MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Beat Generation’: The Dream Then and Now

Janet Forman’s “The Beat Generation--An American Dream” (at the Nuart through Thursday) offers a comprehensive and engaging study of a small group of writers who had a far greater and lasting impact than they could have ever imagined.

Not only does Forman talk to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who so often turn up in documentaries on their times, but also to many crucial yet less familiar individuals. Most important is the rich context that Forman and narrator Steve Allen provide for the writers through a far-ranging and imaginative selection of archival footage and images.

The film’s key point is that the young people who became known as “the beats” simply did not feel they fit into postwar America. It was a time when a renewed emphasis on conformity in the wake of military victory coincided with a soon-booming consumer economy, the dawn of the nuclear age, the Cold War and McCarthyism. The beats, whom Jack Kerouac defined simply as being “sympathetic,” came from a wide range of backgrounds. They realized that there was much dissatisfaction in an idealized suburbia and wanted to pursue their own, anti-materialistic version of the American dream.

Forman flashes images of Eisenhower’s 1956 landslide win, a shot of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams at bat and schoolchildren ducking under their desks for a bomb drill to sum up the era in which Kerouac caused such a sensation with his paean to freedom, “On the Road.” We learn that before Ginsberg took peyote he was a San Francisco marketing consultant--”commercial brainwashing” is what he calls it today--with a Nob Hill apartment and a girlfriend.

Among many others, we meet Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones). Through film clips and reminiscences we’re able to feel the charismatic impact of the two mythical, central figures of the movement, Kerouac and his buddy and key inspiration, Neal Cassady. They’re the two who did not survive.

One of the most illuminating of the interviewees is poet Diane diPrima, who says of Kerouac that while he wrought change he could not himself change. She also reminds us that in the ‘50s women in the movement were by no means able to liberate themselves as fully as the men and that, unless they were prepared to be tough and aggressive, they tended to be left out. (When invited to an orgy by Kerouac, DiPrima worried about finding a baby-sitter.) It was a dangerous time for nonconforming women, she states, recalling that a girlfriend of hers who had become an unwed mother died from the shock-treatment therapy forced upon her by her parents.

“The Beat Generation” explores how the beats were co-opted by the media by the late ‘50s, spawning beatniks, those kids who were inspired by the writings of the authentic beats to rebel against their parents. If you came of age in the ‘50s feeling as though you were an outsider, you may find “The Beat Generation” (Times-rated: Mature) unsettling because there is a sense of resolution in all the individuals interviewed, something few of us ever have the courage to attain.