On the Road (2013)

ON THE ROAD  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Walter Salles
    Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart,
    Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams,
    Alice Braga, Tom Sturridge, Elisabeth Moss,
    Danny Morgan, Steve Buscemi, Terrence Howard
According to most of the people who knew him, Neal Cassady was the 20th century's most accomplished car thief, driver, womanizer and speed freak, as well as one of the most charming and irresponsible human beings who ever lived. Though he wasn't much of a writer, he was an undeniable force of nature, the blast of restless, reckless energy the Beat movement might not have existed without. "On the Road", Jack Kerouac's all but unfilmable novel, is a barely fictionalized account of what it was like to drive cross-country with Cassady in the late 1940s, and this movie version, not surprisingly, doesn't come close to capturing the book. There are a couple of times when it almost gets there, once during a hallucinatory fever dream the Kerouac character has in Mexico, and the other when he finally sits down at his Underwood to turn his  scribbled notes into "On the Road". Otherwise, it's a disjointed, episodic road movie with actors who try real hard but lack the charisma and authenticity of their real-life counterparts. What it does capture fairly well is the grimy, wired, strung-out energy that goes with spending days on end on the highway in a car. Viggo Mortensen has a good time playing William S. Burroughs - he has the famous drawl down cold - and Kristen Stewart does a nice job as the Cassady character's underaged wife/ex-wife/lover/girlfriend. In fact, she's all of those, but this is Neal Cassady, so who's keeping score?