‘The only people for me,” wrote Jack Kerouac in “On the Road,” “are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live . . . the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.” Youth isn’t like this, but it should be. Hence the everlasting appeal of the book, which finally comes to the screen in a spirited but not quite electrifying film by Walter Salles.
The way Kerouac’s novel jump-starts the (19-year-old) brain is not duplicated here, but Salles is largely faithful and loving to Kerouac’s book and its many shapes. Mostly these are love triangles. Ricocheting between New York, Denver, San Francisco and Louisiana from 1947 to 1951 are: Sal (based on Kerouac and played by Sam Riley), Dean (based on Neal Cassady and played by Garrett Hedlund) and Marylou (based on Cassady’s wife, LuAnne, played by Kristen Stewart).
Then there’s the interlocking triangle of Dean, Marylou and Dean’s next wife and baby mama, the staid San Franciscan Camille (Kirsten Dunst, who mainly sits around frowning). And let’s not forget Dean-Sal-Carlo (based on Allen Ginsberg and played by Tom Sturridge). Carlo is gay; Dean is at least bi-curious. As for Sal, well, based on a text that approaches Dean/Neal the way “The Great Gatsby” treated Daisy Buchanan, let’s just say that Kerouac might not have been quite as straight as he insisted.
What’s best about the film are its quick jumps from one depravity to the next as jazz rambles on the soundtrack: Youth is a candle to be burned at both ends, with (as it was once said about Bob Dylan) a blowtorch in the middle.
Kerouac’s marvelous words, heard in narration, are a cry for experience in clubs and cow towns and the backs of pickup trucks. “To living and to life!” goes a toast in one of many drug-dazed rooms. In the shadows, Salles notices, as Kerouac perhaps did not, how too much living can get you killed. Cassady would be dead at 41, Kerouac a year later, at 47.
But how do you play Sal — the observer, the wingman, a supporting player in his own life? How do you make people watch you watching? The only answer is: by being a movie star. Riley isn’t. He’s a character actor, nicely anguished in the Joy Division movie “Control,” but he doesn’t hold the screen. Stewart is fine in a thankless role (to Kerouac, she’s just a girl) and Hedlund is the best of the three, with his big-shouldered Great Plains swagger and a felonious twinkle in his eyes. But this is Dean Moriarty we’re talking about, one of the most charismatic creations of the 20th century. And Hedlund is still the guy in the neon bike helmet in “Tron: Legacy.” We need more. We need 1990 Johnny Depp.