"Director Ebs Burnough and his starry lineup of interviewees valiantly try to outline those complexities with honesty, and the film is at its best when it homes in on the literary criticism bringing in articulate readers of the text such as novelist Jay McInerney, who details the effort that went into making it look thrown together in a matter of weeks."
"Musician Natalie Merchant, meanwhile, thoughtfully unpacks what still resonates in the book, even though she confesses that, despite her best efforts, her own daughters haven't been able to get through more than a few pages. Elsewhere, comedian-journalist W Kamau Bell, an unstoppable quote machine himself, wryly analyses the book's blindspots on race, and has a great fantasy about what a fine road movie it would have been if Kerouac had gone travelling with James Baldwin."
The documentary offers a generous, elegiac portrait of On the Road that balances admiration with critical awareness of the novel's dated and problematic elements. It foregrounds literary criticism and brings articulate readers who explain craft and the novel's deliberate roughness. Interviewees like Natalie Merchant and W. Kamau Bell unpack what still resonates while pointing out racial and gender blindspots. Joyce Johnson provides personal anecdotes that add context. Actor contributions register sincerity but less insight. Attempts to connect Kerouac's legacy to contemporary American road experiences feel forced and uneven, undermining the film's effort to make the novel fully relevant to younger generations.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]