They were looking for a new way of life, and they inspired a generation of young people to look along with them.
And those are just the actors. Kristen Stewart, the 22-year-old star who has been hounded into what looks like exhaustion by the tabloid press, emerged in public this week for the first time in two months. The occasion was the North American premiere of On the Road, Walter Selles's jazzy interpretation of the Jack Kerouac book about a group of young people driving down the existential highways of 1950s America.
Stewart plays Marylou, a freespirited teenager who marries the animating spirit of the long and jazzy road trip - a charismatic ex-con named Dean Moriarty and played by rising Garrett Hedlund - for a life of drugs and open sexuality and a search for a new kind of life. The book became the defining document of the so-called beat generation of young hipsters in postwar America.
"As a sensitive girl of this time who is maybe a bit more conventional - ha ha - I kind of was curious about how you could have the strength to do the things she did," Stewart said the day after On the Road had its public premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. "And it's not that at all. It takes a lot of strength to be supervulnerable. She was so-so so open to the world."
It's a road that has, in some way, been going on since Kerouac published the book in 1957, disguising himself (his character, played by Sam Riley, is called Sal Paradise) and his friends (Dean Moriarty is actually proto-hipster Neal Cassady) as they roared down the twolane blacktop of a simpler, lesscrowded country, looking for kicks and for truth.
"It's the expression of youth," Hedlund said. "Wanting to grasp everything and have it at the same time. Live long and never die."
Hedlund read all the literature and met with members of Cassady's family, and he discovered a man who wanted to experience everything in life.
"Things were happening and he wanted to be there," he said.
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