Years in the making, with seemingly every young actor and hot director having once been attached to its adaptation, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is now a film, and a damn good one at that:

Walter Salles has conjured a movie that’s raging and serene, always looking over the horizon while grooving on the beauty of the here and now. This is no small feat. Salles made The Motorcycle Diaries, the only other great road film of recent memory, but still, there are many ways for a Kerouac film to go bust (see The Subterraneans), and this one avoids nearly all of them. Maybe it leaves too much of the book’s kinetic language on the floor; this is a story about words almost as much as it is about movement, the road. But as these burning, dreaming, and frustrated wanderers blast back and forth across postwar America in search of what they don’t know, the smoky poetry of its wide vistas and clangorous urban buzz provide a kick, a true kick…

On the Road is playing now in very limited release, and should expand wider in January; look for it.

My full review is at PopMatters.

You can see the trailer here: