In On the Road, Walter Salles’ reverent, at times almost painfully faithful adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s birth-of-the-Beat-spirit novel, the characters are always getting high on one thing or another, and I don’t just mean drugs — though they do smoke weed and dissolve Benzedrine into their coffee. They also go to after-hours clubs and listen to twisty ecstatic jazz, their bodies shaking and writhing as the music works its way inside them. They have a lot of sex, too, some of it pretty exposed (hello, NC-17!): On a car ride to nowhere, Sal (Sam Riley), the Kerouac character, who is eager but recessive — a boy-man taking careful stock of everything he drinks in — gets naked in the front seat along with Dean (Garret Hedlund), the Neal Cassady life-force stud narcissist, and Marylou (Kristen Stewart), Dean’s naively game young ex-wife, who is seated, also naked, between the two men as she pleasures each of them with her hands. (I’m not kidding when I say that Kristen Stewart acts this scene very well — for once, she looks more ebullient than cool.) The other high at work is the religion of words. Sal keeps dipping into a volume of Proust, and he types into the night and scribbles in his notebook, doing all that he can to give form to feeling. READ FULL STORY »
