On the Road, the movie, should have been in theaters months ago, but its release was delayed until March 22. Or you could say it should have been in theaters years ago, at least since Francis Coppola acquired the rights to Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel in 1979, but the conditions needed for a successful production just didn’t coalesce. Or, if you feel very protective of the book, a Beat-era milestone often described as unflimable, you could say it never should have been in theaters at all.
But here it is at last, from director Walter Salles, who with writer José Rivera also made The Motorcycle Diaries, and now has cornered the market on retrospective period road movies about pretty young people whose seeking spirits fate them to become generational representatives. Foremost a chronicle of Kerouac’s own North American wayfarings of the late 1940s, Rivera and Salles’ On the Road stars Sam Riley as author stand-in Sal Paradise, an immigrant’s kid and an introvert in need of new possibilities, and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (standing in for Neal Cassady), Sal’s all-American cowboy muse. Pushing and pulling each other through mutual fatherlessness and wanderlust, they embark on a now-recognizably archetypal adventure of sex and drugs and cross-country driving.
The ladies in these men’s lives include but are not limited to a teen nymph played with refreshing and surprising physicality by Kristen Stewart, and Kirsten Dunst as, eventually, the wised-up mother of Dean’s child. Plus, like street side flickers glimpsed from a cruising car window, shining cameos abound in On the Road, most notably one from Viggo Mortensen in a brief but pretty good William Burroughs pose. It’s a film full of game performances, all of which seem incomplete; this is, after all, a meditation on the human state of feeling unfinished.
In other words, as a movie, On the Road doesn’t quite add up. But how could it? Making it up as you go was, arguably, both a subject and a style for Kerouac, but Rivera and Salles’ film — especially after taking so long to get made, and even longer to get seen — can’t possibly feel like a spontaneous self-invention. Who can even watch it without already knowing what it has to live up to?
