Inspired by the Allan Ginsberg poem of the same name, HOWL shows the eponymous hero (James Franco) reading the work out lout to a group of fellow-poets in San Francisco. The work obviously inspired extreme passions: the audience listen in rapt attention to a work that depicts the poet's feelings through an earthy yet compelling idiom. In an attempt to show how the poem might work, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman introduce a series of animated sequences; none of them try to 'explain' the work, but rather show how Ginsberg's language works associatively, inspiring moods rather than following any logical sequence. When the work was first published in the mid-Fifities, it was the subject of a famous obscenity trial: Epstein and Friedman restage that trial, showing how the poem was criticized for its apparent earthiness of language, and then cleared on the grounds that Ginsberg was only following the principle of free speech. HOWL is an enthralling piece, encouraging viewers not to 'understand' the significance of the poem in terms of meaning, but to see it as symptomatic of a particular moment in American history, when old taboos and/or standards of moral or civilized behavior were subject to intense scrutiny. The conservatism of the early Fifties had been superseded by a new spirit of adventure, encapsulated in Ginsberg's work, that looked forward to the spirit of the Sixties. James Franco offers a convincing characterization of Ginsberg, supported by memorable cameos from David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, and Bob Balaban as the main protagonists in the court case.
