The Blonde Ambition

After its premiere at Cannes earlier this year, Walter Salles's On the Road – based on the 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac – has now arrived for its UK release in a re-edited form, trimmed by 15 minutes to just over two hours. The dissatisfactions of this overripe and overblown road movie remain exactly the same. The film is stiflingly reverent towards its source material, and indeed towards itself. It's good-looking and handsomely produced, but directionless and self-adoring, richly furnished but at the same time weirdly empty, bathed in an elegiac sunset glow of male adoration.

What seemed rhapsodic and euphoric on the page here looks smug, self-regarding and intensely self-conscious. When the actors start mouthing ersatz-passionate dialogue about poetry and novels, the movie starts to flatline, and worse still, when they start on about how incredibly life-affirming they all are, it is as dead as a haddock on a slab. The men in the film look hopelessly shallow. The women become, by contrast, sharper and more interesting in their dissent and discontent, but in a way that unbalances and destabilises the drama. It's comparable to Salles's other road movie, The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), about the early adventures of Che Guevara and his buddy Alberto Granado, but there the travellers were learning to think and care about people other than themselves. This isn't the case with the heroes of On the Road, who have dozens of madly contrived parties, in which they heroically swig from bottles, smoke joints, have sex and become narcissistic and boring in a way that isn't intentional.

The road trip back and forth across the US is part of the literary education of budding writer Sal Paradise, played by Sam Riley. In the late 1940s, Sal's father has just died; he hangs out with the gabbling Ginsberg-figure Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) in various hipster dives, but is himself blocked. Then everything is turned around by meeting a beautiful man, Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), based of course on the Beat icon Neal Cassady. He's a wild free spirit, a wanderer taking odd jobs and turning tricks. Dean is gloriously unfettered by the boring bonds of hearth and home; he is a hobo of the mind and spirit, just taking off when and where he pleases, squeezing life dry. His companion is the gorgeous 16-year-old Marylou, played by Kristen Stewart, but he seems to have other quasi-conjugal ties around the country about whom he isn't too worried. Inspired by this freewheeling alpha-male, Sal himself hits the road, sometimes with Dean, sometimes without, scribbling notes for a book.

Sal has a sort of homoerotic bond with Dean, which is displaced into their mutual infatuation with Marylou, but there is never any sense that either man genuinely cares for Marylou, or is interested in her: there are many, many scenes in which the guys greet each other with fond hugs, fonder than the embraces they give the women, but even these emotional connections are subordinate to the ones they have with themselves.

Other friends and acquaintances join them on the road, and we become aware that while the guys are heading for the hills, they have in almost every case left a woman behind, fuming. Camille (Kirsten Dunst) finally throws Dean out on his ear; Galatea (Elisabeth Moss) rages at her errant husband – and the women's anger, though shrill and futile, has a kind of real life that the complacent male voyagers do not. Marylou herself is endlessly tolerant, endlessly bland. What has she sacrificed or gained in her emotional and erotic adventures with the two heroes? It's a mystery. Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams have eccentric cameos as Old Bull Lee (based on William Burroughs) and Jane, a couple who give houseroom to the travellers.

On the Road was an explosion of literary energy, an intensely American grabbing of possibilities, but the movie insists too much on its elegiac past tense. For me, the film comes fully alive only in the break between Sal and Dean, a break that shows something has been at stake after all. In literature, as in life, there are winners and losers. The writer may have been subordinate to the glamorous man of action, but has been all along a kind of parasite. Poor Dean is just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot, but even here, Sam Riley's Sal does not register any sense of sadness or betrayal or what Greene called the splinter of ice in one's heart that a writer needs – merely a vague regret. Well, that arguably does justice to the ruthlessness and reserve a writer needs. The journey is supposed to count more than the destination. Both feel like a disappointment here.