Empty-headed hipsters: "Howl"

All that was once shocking and art must eventually be chewed over, broken down and spat out as commerce and mediocrity. Howl, a dry, hotchpotch Beat Generation primer from The Celluloid Closet directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman - a sort of Ginsberg for dummies, better suited to filler slots on PBS than cinemas - splits its ninety minutes three ways. A biographical interview has Ginsberg himself (James Franco) jawing through his life and working methods, how he got into poetry and homosexuality alike. Then there are enacted highlights of the obscenity trial brought against "Howl"'s publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as here defended by Mad Men's Jon Hamm and prosecuted by David Strathairn, now established as the go-to actor for petty-minded squares, after The Notorious Bettie Page. Finally, we are confronted by some dreadfully kitsch animations "inspired by" Ginsberg's verse, which pre-empt the audience having to use their imaginations for themselves; while the film mocks Strathairn's character for seeking a literal interpretation of "Howl"'s imagery, it's guilty of doing much the same thing itself.

Franco dutifully lowers his voice a couple of octaves and dons thick-rimmed specs above a marker-pen beard, but he remains too pretty for Ginsberg - there's no reason for him to write, with those cheekbones - and the performance an impersonation more than it is an embodiment. (With his elongated final syllables, the actor sounds uncannily like critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins in the poetry reading sequences.) The tripartite structure, rather than offering a multiplicity of perspectives, instead moves in the direction of crude reduction: you'd never peg from the film that "Howl" was intended as a cry of protest against a conformist, consumerist America, on behalf of the disillusioned and disenfranchised. As this garbled reading has it, Ginsberg was someone who just liked to scatter obscenities to the wind.

Howl opens in selected cinemas from Friday.