This "Howl" Worth Celebrating as James Franco Shines

There are two stars of Howl, the long-awaited film about Allen Ginsberg's iconic poem of the same name. The first is James Franco, who portrays a young Ginsberg, and the second is the poem itself.

This is the first non-documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman (Common Threads, The Celluloid Closet), and it has moments so compelling it's easy to believe it's presenting a reality captured by some prescient documentarian following a then-unknown Ginsberg around with an 8mm camera.

But Howl isn't a documentary. In fact, it's hard to fit it easily into any recognizable category of film, like a biopic or even a dramatization.

It is clearly a tribute to Ginsberg the man, delivering frame after frame of his ruminations and memories, his pain and his joy, all told to an anonymous interviewer who remains unseen behind the camera. It's also a faithful re-enactment of the 1955 obscenity trial that saw "Howl" exonerated and, by the same token, fifties era repressive society condemned for its own prissiness and shallowness.

Beyond anything else, however, it's a celebration of Ginsberg's poem. It's worth the price of admission just to see Franco intone, laugh, shout, rejoice, thunder and caress its words, pouring them out in front of the San Francisco coffeehouse hipster crowd that was its first audience.

It's something else, too, which is unfortunately not so successful.

Howl was originally conceived as a documentary about the obscenity trial of "Howl" publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. However, as the filmmakers told audiences at a Sundance premiere, the real life footage just didn't work. So they went back to the drawing board – literally.

Along with the scenes re-enacting Ginsberg's life and the "Howl" obscenity trial, they enlisted the talents of animator Eric Drooker to illustrate the poem. Graphic, strong and set to a jazzy musical background, the images bring to life the beautiful as well as the nightmarish qualities of Ginsberg's flood of words.

And that's the problem. The copulating wraiths, Ginsberg's friends and lovers, drug addicts and ghosts, the landscape of the highways and broken streets of America – it's all spelled out in explicit form, and there's an argument to be made that it shouldn't have been.

Love the animated sequences or hate them, however, it's Franco's performance that defines Howl.

Ginsberg aspired to slice himself open and bleed on the page when he wrote; anything that came between what was in his mind and what ended up on the page was to be purged and ruthlessly cut away. To listen to his words begging for, demanding, genuineness in artistic and personal expression, and then realize they're being delivered by an actor, should seem like a violation of Ginsberg's own credo.

But it doesn't, simply because, if the fact that Franco isn't Ginsberg even occurs to a viewer at all; it's only in being reminded that acting, too, is an art form that benefits when the artist lets himself bleed.

The re-enactment of the "Howl" obscenity trial, a period piece rich with the colors and stylized fashions of the late 50s, doesn't match the intensity of Franco's performance, but it's completely engaging and often quite funny.

The courtroom drama is enlivened by some terrific, if brief, performances, including Mary Louise Parker as a prosecuting witness and David Strathairn, who portrayed Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, as prosecuting attorney Ralph McIntosh.

Mary Louise Parker in Howl