Sissy Spacek, Beatnik

If you've watched enough Hollywood movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s, you may know that Hollywood had what feels like a rather stereotypical view of the beatnik. And then many years later they had the chance to show the original beatniks, only to come up with something that feels rather tepid. That movie is Heart Beat, which I recently got the chance to watch.

Sissy Spacek provides the narration, giving a stereotypical talk about 1950s suburbia and introducing us to a pair of men. One is the well-known writer Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write On the Road and get it published in the late 1950s, although as the movie opens it's the late 1940s and Kerouac (John Heard) is still living with his mother in a New York City apartment. The second man is Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte), who came from Denver where he spent a lot of his adolescence in reform school since his alcoholic father abandond him. Indeed, in this telling of the story when Cassady gets out of prison he immediately steals another car and heads to New York, which is where he meets Kerouac. The two then head west for San Franciso together with a girl.

In San Francisco, the pair meet Carolyn Robinson (that's Sissy Spacek), who's studying art at the art institute and is engaged to a guy named Dick who doesn't play all that much part in the rest of the story. Jack, Neal, and Carolyn become an inseparable threesome living in a tenement apartment and working what odd jobs they can to make the rent, although Neal ultimate gets a better job with the railroad. Eventually Jack decides to head back to New York to try to sell his manuscript to On the Road which he keeps rolled up in what looks like a grocery bag. Neal has by this time knocked up Carolyn, and Jack suggests to Carolyn that she probably shouldn't marry Neal because she's not going to be happy.

With kids and responsibility, Neal and Carolyn move out to the sort of early-1950s tract housing that was being builty to accommodate the families creating the Baby Boom, and Neal has a tendency to shock the neighbors. After several years, Jack shows up again, and takes a "room" in the attic of the Cassady house with the three living in what again seems like somewhat of an open relationship, something that really shocks the neighbors. Jack heads back to New York again, and with help from Ira (Ray Sharkey), someone supposedly based in part on Allen Ginsberg who wanted nothing to do with this movie, gets On the Road published and becomes a sensation. The fact that the main character is rather based on Neal, however, causes problems for Neal, who eventually gets busted for marijuana possession.

The last act of the movie involves Cassady's itinerance, driving a converted school bus with a bunch of hippie-like characters; Cassady would die fairly young not having published much in his lifetime, although the movie doesn't mention Neal's death.

Once again, I can see why any number of people would have felt influenced by works like On the Road and would want to make a movie based on Kerouac. (I, to be honest, have not read On the Road and have never been terribly interested in the counterculture.) The movie we get in Heart Beat, however, feels rather anodyne. These people lived what in many ways turned out to be wild lives, yet everything feels rather sanitized. I think the actors do the best they can with the material, but it doesn't work as well as one might hope.