On the road.

On the road - the wonderful novel by Jack Kerouac, published in 1957, written in the late forties. I have to admit that I have never actually read the whole book - I did start it when I was younger but maybe I was a little too young (a teenager I suppose) therefore a lot didn't make sense to me or I couldn't relate to it. I would definitely want to give it a another shot today - and not only because it is considered a timeless, cult classic novel. 

So when I heard that Walter Salles (director of "The Motorcycle Diaries") had taken on the project of turning the famous novel into a motion picture, staring Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart, I was divided: I am really not a fan of Kristen Stewart but I do like Sam Riley (mainly as Ian Curtis in "Control"). I decided to give it a shot on Friday night and ... surprisingly I was not disappointed! 
The plot is simple - after the death of his father Sal (played by Sam Riley, who also narrates the whole story), who is a young writer, meets Dean in New York City in 1947. Dean wants to be a writer too, but he also likes to party, which involves a lot of drugs and booze,  fooling around with too many girls and in general not take life too seriously. 
Dean and Sal soon find themselves on a road trip, accompanied by MaryLou (played by a pretty blank Kristen Stewart), who is Dean's 16 year-old child-wife. From there on we see Sal going on a variety of  road trips, meeting different characters (among them Viggo Mortensen as William S. Burroughs, Amy Adams as his wife Jane, and Kirsten Dunst as Dean's second wife) chronicled through the late 1940's. 

I thought the film was incredibly beautifully shot, well acted (especially by Riley and Hedlund), it was very stylish and the obvious eye candy (Dean portrayed by Garrett Hedlund) can't hurt either. The soundtrack and the fashion really stood out for me - it was a time of beatniks,  a time before the word "hipster" existed (even though the cast resembles today's hipsters), a time of writing literature and poetry, a time where rules - and life  were not taken too seriously. After leaving the theatre I felt almost melancholic - longing for a time long before I was even born, a place that I only visited once but which felt so magical to me: New York City. 

"The only people for me are the mad ones," Sal says in one of the book's (and the film's) most celebrated passages. "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles across the night."