Perhaps our high-speed culture, which at first glance might seem likely to drive On the Road into obsolescence, is at least in part responsible for the book’s ongoing relevance. Sal’s peace is not found because he is bumming around America, but because of the experiences he has on his way. He finds release in bars and bop-joints and in witnessing the lives of Dean, Carlo Marx, Remi Boncoeur, Chad King and a host of other characters he meets on his way. In short, the release is not about getting anywhere, but the journey itself—or life.

In today’s world, this kind of angst is only exacerbated when the journey is an hour-long shuttle-flight from New York to Boston, or when one can “travel the world” online, without talking to anybody, tasting the food or heaven forbid getting bitten by the mosquitoes. These experiences that make up life’s very fabric are so easily lost in the perpetual race to be the world’s youngest investment banker, then the world’s richest investment banker and finally the world’s youngest retiree. One can hardly wonder at the fact that Beat literature and the honest, unpretentious personal experiences it often features are at the center of the inevitable backlash. Neither should one be surprised at the resurgent desire for the journey.

“A Kerouac Odyssey”

If Harvard students feel up to the journey, they can catch up on Kerouac and the Beats at the release of a new documentary this weekend. A Kerouac Odyssey premieres today in Lowell, Mass., the mill-town in which Kerouac was born, and will play through March 12, the late author’s eightieth birthday.

The project has been 20 years in the making. Writer-director Doug Sharples was inspired by Allen Ginsburg, who in 1982 staged a ten-day celebration of Kerouac intended, as Sharples remembers, to “turn the tide against the literary establishment that was still leery of Kerouac even thirteen years after his death.”

In the years since, Ginsburg’s tide-turning effort has proved undeniably successful, and critics who were once quick to write off the author have for the most part either changed their minds or passed into oblivion.

And so A Kerouac Odyssey is framed not in defense of the author, but simply in memory. It is a documentary firmly “rooted in the 20th century, Kerouac’s century,” says Sharples, and captures the intellectual struggles of a man trying to reconcile the “naïve and hopeful” with “bouts of existential despair.”

“There have to be minions of neo-hipsters, as well as earnest scholars of 20th century American literature at Harvard, who . . . would dig this movie,” says Sharples.

film

A Kerouac Odyssey

Directed by Doug Sharples

Starring Bill Mabon

Real Films