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Beat

2002, Movie, R, 93 mins

Beat: Review

BEAT
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A game cast in period drag marches through standard-issue biopic cliches while spouting literary-flavored dialogue. During the late forties and early fifties, a loose-knit coterie of free thinkers coalesced into the Beat Movement. The circle's most influential member, New York-based journalist Lucien Carr (Norman Reedus), brought together gay poet Allen Ginsberg (Ron Livingston), rolling stone Jack Kerouac (Daniel Martinez), bisexual novelist William S. Burroughs (Kiefer Sutherland) and Burroughs' patient wife, Joan Vollmer (Courtney Love). Nerdy gay professor Dave Kammerer (Kyle Secor) circles the periphery of the in crowd and has an intense crush on the charismatic Carr, who's straight; Carr exploits Kammerer's interest with no intention of reciprocating his attentions. Carr's poor judgement in this respect eventually catches up to him, and he winds up killing the besotted Kammerer. After serving a short prison stretch, Carr and Ginsberg drive to Mexico City for a bittersweet reunion with the Burroughs, who are scraping out a living with their two small children in Mexico. But only Joan is there to greet the travelers; her husband refuses to cancel his vacation with a hustler. While Carr professes his love for neglected Joan, Ginsberg suppresses his unrequited longing for Carr, who eventually consummates his passion with Joan then heads back to New York, abandoning both. Meanwhile, back at the Burroughs home, he confesses that his hustler boyfriend is pressuring him for money and she admits her infidelity; during the boozy weekend that ensues, the gun-toting Burroughs kills Joan while attempting to shoot an apple off her head. Her death brings Carr the kind of pain he casually inflicted on others, while Burroughs goes on to become the novelist Joan always believed he would be. This game of 'let's dress up as famous writers' gets good grades for its production design, though it plays fast and loose with at least one major part of the story: The real-life Kammerer, whom Carr (father of novelist Caleb Carr) killed in 1944, had been infatuated Carr since Carr was youngster (Kammerer was his scout master when Carr was a boy scout), and followed him from their hometown of St. Louis to Manhattan. Overall the film reduces complicated figures to the level of who's-sleeping-with-whom, and reduces tangled emotional relationships and psychological motivations to mere sexual frustration. leave a comment --Robert Pardi
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