With any luck, later this year audiences everywhere will get to see Howl, a brilliant film by Academy-Award winning documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Starring James Franco as a young Allen Ginsburg, the film follows the 1957 trial surrounding the publication of his poem Howl. Queer cinema doesn't get a lot of play in Hollywood, despite the countless gay men and women who work in the business, but 'Howl' should be an exception. Daring in form, and excellently crafted, 'Howl' manages to show a few golden moments in the life of one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century, while also clearly articulating what Ginsberg refered to as the '(homosexual) condition.' To be clear, this is not a 'gay film.' This is a film about the power of language. Ginsberg's work shocked people for its frankness and the film is, at times, shocking in its choice of imagery.

For that, though, audiences leave the theatre with a complete portrait of a man whose influence on the literary canon will not soon wane. The script--which relies heavily on dialog taken verbatim from the poem's trial as well as transcripts of an interview Ginsberg gave to Life magazine--is interspersed with a reading of the poem itself. Now, beat poetry isn't everyone's thing and it's doubtful that general audiences will have read the works Ginsberg references through the poem itself--Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Friedrich Nietztche's On the Geneaology of Morals among them--which is why the film's combination of narrative, documentary and animation elements is so effective. The story of the poem's trial is interspersed throughout the film with chunks where Franco speaks directy to the audience and delivers a diaphragmatic reading of the poem. The poem's reading is overlaid with animation, which vividly shows the audience what it is Ginsberg is talking about in the poem. (It works, too. As I boarded a packed shuttle back to Sundance Festival Headquarters, I overheard several conversations about 'Howl.' How To Install Windows Xp From Usb Flashboot there.