Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats

2/10/2019

Good documentary could have benefited from more interviews and and poetry readings, which are out there. "The Dharma Bums" barely gets mentioned. Still, an informative look at a groundbreaking figure and literary giant.

9/27/2023

The King of the Beats gets a rather standard documentary treatment, complete with badly done reenactments, but it is hard to screw up such a strong subject. Filmed in the early 1980's, all the Beat writers and various hangers-on are trotted out to tell the story of the author of "On the Road," a novel that changed modern literature. Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922 and went to Columbia University on a football scholarship. He pounded out "On the Road" in three weeks, on a giant scroll of parchment paper. He eventually married a couple of times, had a daughter he was never close to, but always wrote- and drank. When Kerouac's life finally seemed to be turning for the better (he was selling his novels), he had a small breakdown over the newfound fame and turned to the