‘Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation’ (review)

The United States of America seems to exist in a perpetual Groundhog Day circuit of endless repetition.  Civil rights battles are waged, won, and erased.

The cultural consciousness expands, yet somehow never enough to prevent it from eventually contracting again.

Or, as the noted Kerouac enthusiast Janis Joplin once suggested, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…which may be the reason why hoary old cultural touchstones from the much maligned “Okay, Boomer” era have recently gotten their mojo back as Trump revives the legacy of his mentor, Roy Cohn, to make 1950s-style bigotry and blacklisting freshly topical again.

For instance, in July of ’25, Sacha Jenkins’s Netflix documentary Sunday Best reminded viewers that Ed Sullivan, long relegated to hacky “really big shoo” impressions, was actually a risk-taking iconoclast who made himself an enemy of powerful (and, in some cases, very dangerous) Southern segregationists as a white man more than willing to share his stage and television broadcast with a cavalcade of iconic black performers.

By comparison, director Ebs Burnough profiles a notably thornier icon in Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation — yet one of the strengths of this offbeat layer cake of a documentary is its acknowledgement of its subject as a flawed man mired in his time who nevertheless tapped into a shared national yearning for rebellion that feels both timely and timeless.

Or, to quote “Hey, Jack Kerouac” troubadour Natalie Merchant (who wrote the line “when you were the brightest star, who were the shadows” as an acknowledgement of the author’s Beat Generation boys’ club misogyny), “America is so much about myth-making that he seems kind of like the quintessential American idol: self-destructive, self-delusional, self-aggrandizing.  But there are passages in his books that are so luminous…you just have to wonder what could have happened if he hadn’t self-destructed.”

Similarly, the comedian and cultural commentator W. Kamau Bell acknowledges that Kerouac’s On the Road is likewise rooted in white male privilege, but also: “I have the context to know that…so I’m not necessarily going to be offended by it.  And part of the reason you want to [read it] is, like, what is it like to be a white guy who could travel across the country in 1957?  I wouldn’t do that now.”

Yet even as Bell speculates about the lost classic that might have resulted if Kerouac had picked a traveling companion like James Baldwin, the film and its interviewees never lose sight of the complexities of both the era and the Beats themselves fueling the relatable humanity that’s drawn so many to their work over the decades.

For instance, in the more traditionally biographical sections of the film, Burnough reminds viewers of Kerouac’s (still sadly and freshly topical) struggles as a working-class immigrant speaking English as a second language, his likely (semi-closeted) bisexuality in a deeply repressed era, and his gnawing desire to break free of the suffocating, hypocritical conformity of a conservative society paying lip service to freedom while disdaining unfettered individuality.

And then, like the jazz musicians Kerouac loved, Burnough riffs on the documentary’s themes via intertwining tales of contemporary travelers seeking different sorts of solace while crisscrossing the nation, an offbeat cinematic strategy amidst the talking heads and archival footage that arguably helps to underscore the reasons for On the Road‘s continuing relevance — in large part thanks to the hopeful charisma of the people we meet along the way, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”

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Produced by Eliza Hindmarch, John Battsek, Ebs Burnough
Written by Eliza Hindmarch
Directed by Ebs Burnough
Featuring Michael Imperioli, W. Kamau Bell, Josh Brolin, Matt Dillon,
Natalie Merchant, Ann Charters, David Amram, Jay McInerney, Kim Jones,
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Joyce Johnson, Diana Langley, Tenaj Melendras,
Faustino Melendras, Amir Staten, Angel Staten, Karlynne Staten