On the Road, the latest film from director Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) is a lovingly conceived cinematic interpretation of Jack Kerouac’s freewheeling journey through America during the golden age of jazz in search of revelation. The film delves into the lives of colourful characters, beautiful landscapes, the quest for adventure, the intoxicating highs of a life on the edge and the bottomless lows of heartbreak and promises unfulfilled. The film earnestly invokes our sentimentality for ‘the road,’ but falls short in capturing the boundless exuberance for freedom and adventure that the endless highway represents.

The film starts out with Dean Moriarty, played by the boyish Garrett Hedlund, swerving cars wildly in and out of a parking lot. From the outset we sense the ‘burn, burn, burn’ of Kerouac’s spiritual leader, reflected not only in the character himself but in the frenetic quality of the cinematography, which is jittery and cut and paste styled. The story introduces character Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s alter ego, and Carlo Marx, our Allen Ginsberg. We fumble through their immediate connection over literature, jazz and parties, take Benzedrine with them while awkwardly reciting prose and listen to Dean have sex with every female character in the room. Dean and Carlo take off to Denver, after which Sal soon gets restless and heads west to meet them. So begins, as he says, his life on the road.

For fans of Kerouac’s famous novel, measuring the success of the book against the qualities of the movie is a recipe for disappointment. While the film follows the basic structure of the book, it omits large chunks as well as merely paying lip-service to others. It does not exhilarate like the book that inspired a generation of middle-class kids to wander through America. Part of the reason is its lack of authenticity as a travel log. We don’t see downtown San Francisco, the bookstores and neighbourhoods that were central hangouts for the beats. We don’t cross the great plains and get excited seeing the majestic Rockies rise up in the distance and we certainly don’t get any sense of Queen’s, NYC in the late 1940s. One notable exception is Algiers, Lousiana, where the dilapidated house of William Bourroughs (Viggo Mortenson) sits in the mud at the bottom of America, and where at last we get a palpable sense of location. For having as its goal experiencing ‘America the Beautiful’, the film barely lets us look outside the car window.