Big Sur (2013)

BIG SUR  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Polish
    Jean-Marc Barr, Kate Bosworth, Josh Lucas,
    Radha Mitchell, Anthony Edwards, Balthazar Getty,
    Patrick Fischler, Henry Thomas, Stana Katic
An ambitious attempt to make something cinematic out of Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness novel. It's 1960, and Jack's at least 10 years removed from the events he chronicled in "On the Road". He's 40 now, a reluctant icon, lost and unfocused and well on the way to drinking himself to death. (He would succeed at that eventually.) The story, such as it is, starts with Kerouac hanging out by himself at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin on the California coast. The setting's serene, rustic, idyllic, just the place (Jack hopes) to take a break from the demands of fame, think, read, do some writing and maybe dry out. After three days of this, Kerouac's bored. After three weeks, he's back in San Francisco, drinking and carousing with his fellow Beats. The movie shifts back and forth between the city, the cabin and Neal Cassady's house in Los Gatos the rest of the way. Writer/director Polish does a smart thing here, using voiceover narration throughout, and making the movie revolve around Kerouac's words. Kerouac admits he's a "word-spinner," not an "idea man," and he's right. He's a writer in love with language, but the ideas spin out of the words and evaporate almost as quickly as they form. Polish does something else that Walter Salles didn't manage nearly as well in the film version of "On the Road". He's found actors - Jean-Marc Barr as Kerouac and Josh Lucas as Cassady - who look enough like their real-life counterparts to be credible playing them. Barr is especially good at capturing Kerouac's shifts in mood, from spontaneous joy to boozed-out gloom and all the stops in between. None of that makes "Big Sur" a movie for everybody.  But for fans of the Beats, and Kerouac in particular, it's worth a serious look. And Barr's brooding, bemused performance comes as close to Jack Kerouac as anybody who's not Jack Kerouac seems likely to get.