I've never read Jack Kerouac's On The Road.
Instead, I was introduced to one of the defining novels of the 20th century by this incredibly shitty Kristen Stewart movie. Rather than being carried away by the power of Kerouac's prose, I simply felt an overwhelming sensation that I had failed at life.
Nobody reads On The Road for the plot or the characters, I'm told by people lucky enough to have read the book before seeing this movie; they read it for Kerouac's singular style. The film has very little of that style, and instead lives and dies — mostly dies — by its thoroughly unlikeable characters and their bland misadventures.
This film could just as easily be called Hipster Douchebags In The '40s, and it would honestly be a more accurate title, given how little time these characters actually spend on the road and how much time they spend in the same cities doing the same self-consciously 'hedonistic' shit they could have done absolutely anywhere.
If On The Road has a redeeming feature, it's that it proves to old people that, no, there is nothing exceptionally wrong with this generation — there have simply always been pointless, narcissistic arseholes, and some of them are simultaneously lucky enough to be glamourised by Jack Kerouac and unlucky enough to be adapted to film by Walter Salles.
To be fair, it's probably not Salles' fault that On The Road is so inevitably, unflinchingly, irrefutably awful. The real blame lies with whoever decided it should be adapted for the screen in the first place. (For what it's worth, the culprit appears to be producer Francis Ford Coppola, no stranger to an ambitious failure.)
Similarly, the actors shouldn't be held accountable — leading man Sam Riley (Sal Paradise) isn't awful, even if he can never decide exactly which accent he's trying to pull off. The preternaturally dull Garrett Hedlund (Dean Moriarty) and sullen Kristen Stewart (Mary Lou) are spectacularly miscast as characters described as "hyperkinetic" and "full of life", respectively, but neither of them are casting directors, and they both make the most of the hands they've been dealt.
Even Kirsten Dunst — perhaps my least favourite working actress, whose appearance on-screen marked the exact moment I knew I would hate this film forever — gives a strangely appropriate performance as Camille, who becomes something of an audience identification character.
We routinely check our watches and shuffle in our seats just as she struggles through her loveless marriage to a self-absorbed loser; her perpetually depressed visage and complete lack of agency a worthy substitute for our feelings of helplessness and self-loathing as we realise we chose to sit through this 124-minute-long traffic accident.
On The Road isn't just the most boring film that will ever feature a naked Kristen Stewart jerking off two guys in the front seat of a moving vehicle; it's the most boring film, period. You learn everything you need to know — and, more importantly, everything Salles has to say — about these characters within minutes of meeting them, and from there, it's a long, slow crawl to the finish line.
1/5
On The Road is in cinemas now.
