The manuscript has been rewritten to add breathing space and objectivity. But the story comes at us very differently from the book experience. It's a nice production, with an attractive cast. Instead, we have a more conventional treatment, focusing on character development. Film could certainly have been used to amplify this effect, but this is not that film. We come away impressed by the energy, not the content. It's the momentum that sucks us into the breathless chaos of Kerouac's world. The book burns through its shreds of storyline as if they were just tinder for the blaze of its energy the real fuel is the pacing, even with all its redundancy. So, everyone already knows the story well, no chances are, if you're like me, you read the book and yet remember almost nothing of the story. For 50 years, it's been waiting to be made into a movie. As everyone knows, it's the thinly-veiled autobiographical account of Kerouac and his friends in their pointless but exuberant adventures across America. And one of these few is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. There are very few works of 20th-century American literature that can be called indispensable to our understanding of our culture.
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