Before Jon Hamm was in NY gearing up for SNL, he made an appearance at the Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere of Howl. I was lucky enough to catch a screening of the film, which centers around Allen Ginsberg's life during the beatnik era and his controversial poem.
- Who's behind it? Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman teamed up to write and direct the film, with James Franco, Jon Hamm, Bob Balaban, and David Strathairn as the major players.
- What's it about? The film takes its title from Ginsberg's four-part poem, Howl, and goes back and forth between the year it was written (1955) and the year it became a lawsuit (1957). The movie is cut together into four very distinct parts: we see an interview with Ginsberg (Franco) as he discusses his life and work in 1957, as well as Ginsberg reading his poem to an audience for the first time in 1955. When Franco's not on camera, we see some trippy animation portraying the poem in a literal sense or scenes inside the courtroom debate regarding the poem's obscenities and literary worth.
To see whether or not the pieces all fit together for me, just read more
