Kerouac’s Road
Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is a smartly unconventional look at the 1957 novel that captured a counterculture and continues to resonate with outsiders and inner journey seekers to this very day. Directed by Ebs Burnough (The Capote Tapes), the peripatetic doc includes “never-before-seen material” from the personal archive of Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian immigrants in the small town of Lowell, MA) along with images that provide much-needed context to the sexy author’s postwar milieu. But rather than centering the mythologized man or his alter ego Sal Paradise, Burnough instead takes the inspired decision to focus on the much bigger picture of legacy.
And beyond interviewing the requisite academics and surviving friends (David Amram) and lovers (Joyce Johnson), Burnough gives equal weight to today’s no name “on-the-roaders” that we tag along with, and a diverse slew of big name Kerouac fans that sit for the director’s lens. That includes everyone from Josh Brolin and Matt Dillon, to W. Kamau Bell and Natalie Merchant, to Jay McInerney and Kim Jones – the designer who paid tribute to On the Road with his Fall 2022 collection for Dior. (Kerouac admirer Michael Imperioli also makes an offscreen appearance as the ear-catching voice of Jack.)
Interestingly, Burnough, a Black gay man who grew up in the South, has an outsider’s perspective on this quintessential outsider’s life that allows him to prompt some truly revelatory insights. In one wonderfully telling scene Johnson recalls how Kerouac encouraged not only her writing but also for her to get out and take a solo road trip of her own — an insanely clueless suggestion considering the risks to a single woman on the road. Not only might she die at the hands of a predator, she could lose her life if she needed an abortion. When Burnough asks what the consequences were for men at the time, Johnson seems startled before firmly declaring, “None.” (Stand-up comic and On the Road fan W. Kamau Bell, a Black man raised in the South but also in Massachusetts, finds the book fascinating almost as an anthropological study, pointing out that it’s an exclusive journey made possible by white male privilege.)
Just prior to the doc’s August 1st theatrical premiere, Filmmaker reached out to the multi-hyphenate director, currently the CEO of Hatch House Media, a visiting scholar at Oxford, and a former Senior Advisor to Michelle Obama who served as the Deputy White House Social Secretary.
Filmmaker: Your prior film, 2019’s The Capote Tapes, likewise dealt with a famous white male writer. Which made me wonder how you, as a Black filmmaker, initially approach such characters. Are you drawn to points of connection? Do you view them through a sociological lens?
Burnough: Yes, I certainly am attracted to the sociological aspect of any subject. I tend to look through a sociological lens. But also through the lens of where a character fits in to time, and culture, and place.
And while these two men are contemporaries, one is pretty openly gay – and wants to spend his days and nights with the smart set on yachts. While the other wants to be in Harlem listening to jazz and speaking, talking about poetry and sociology. So they are similar in that, yes, they are both white men, but they are quite different in the way they viewed and experienced the world.
I have a fascination with how people see the world. Mike Nichols used to say there’s also one’s own — my own — personal reality that comes into play. Nichols would direct a film and then, five or ten years later, realize that it was actually about a certain thing in his life. As I look back on The Capote Tapes, I realize that at the time I was doing all the things that I think Truman wanted to do but couldn’t — getting married, starting a family. I was, I think, doing that through the film. So there’s also this personal lens that is always present.
Filmmaker: The array of participants is eclectic, to say the least – from complete unknowns to Oscar-nominated celebs. So how did you find all these folks, and ultimately choose who to include?
Burnough: Some of the more well-known people and celebrities I just knew were passionate about Kerouac and On the Road. Other times I would get a note from one of my kids, or from a producer, “Did you know that Josh Brolin…?” So some we discovered through word of mouth and research and excitement about the project – many just kind of landed at our feet.
As for finding the contemporary vérité travelers, that was done really in association with the incredible (casting agent) Carmen Cuba and her team, who really helped us canvas the internet and beyond. We looked at van life culture, modern-day travelers out on road trips, and people who were following Kerouac’s road. So it was this massive canvas to scour, searching for great stories.
After talking to hundreds of people we slowly began to get a sense of where the standout stories were, where there were tales that aligned with Kerouac’s, which for me was important. I feel like the book is not just a coming of age novel, but also about the process of growing up and becoming an adult. That’s why our three vérité tales also tell the story of life, exemplify the life cycle.
Filmmaker: The film is quite uniquely structured, drifting from archival footage of Kerouac and the Beat era, to interviews with academics and those that knew or take inspiration from him, as well as with modern-day journeyers and those living an On the Road lifestyle. It’s a tricky balance to pull off. So could you talk a bit about the editing? What were some of the biggest challenges?
Burnough: I’ll start out by screaming the name Paul Dreoffer, my incredible editor, because this film could not have been made without him. We spent many hours together in the edit bay going back and forth, trying to weave today into the past and tell a cohesive story. I’m so proud of what we’ve done together. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t clear. One of the inspiring things about On the Road is that it’s a messy book. It was published in 1957, has language that we don’t use anymore, and examines people in ways that we don’t believe in examining people today. It’s a product of its era and yet it remains modern and contemporary; and ubiquitous in terms of not just American but global culture, because it has inspired and continues to inspire people to get out of where they are. To go on the road, to try something new, because part of being human is getting out of where you are and finding community.
It’s not such a direct and straightforward story. It’s not linear. The film isn’t the story of On the Road or of Jack Kerouac, but about the individual journeys that we’re all on. And those individual journeys, because we bump up against one another on the road – both physically and on the road we call life – become a collective. And that’s what we call community. It’s not always easy, but it’s the best part of being human.
Filmmaker: Though I’m a longtime Beat aficionado, I had no idea that Kerouac’s French Canadian immigrant background was so integral to a complete understanding of him as a human being. That feeling of never being “fully” American struck me as more of an issue for Kerouac than his bisexuality (which I question was even really a “struggle.” After all, everyone from Marlon Brando to James Dean was on a sexual journey at the time). So what most surprised you during the making of the doc?
Burnough: I would say that my developing a connection, my understanding of Kerouac’s sense of outsiderness, is probably what struck me the most. I’m embarrassed to say that, when looking at a picture of Kerouac, I used to instantly think, “very good looking, straight white guy, went to Columbia, the world is your oyster.” I did what I constantly tell my kids not to do – judged at first look and assumed there wasn’t anything deeper there.
In this era where everything on social media often looks perfect, his life just looked perfect to me, so I wasn’t all that interested. Until I started really reading more, understanding who Kerouac was. Only then did I have a greater sense of why he went on the road, why he wrote the book – how he must have felt inside his outsider status. How understandable and relatable it all was! So that for me was the biggest surprise.
Filmmaker: What do you hope audiences will take away from the film?
Burnough: Put down your phone! Go outside, get in the car, go for a drive, walk around. Discover that the greatest gift we have is community, which is such an integral part of the human experience.
To me this film is about identifying the things that bring us closer together, as opposed to the algorithms and media silos that are constantly telling us that we have less in common. There’s so much more that we have in common than that which separates us. So, yeah, I want people to walk away and think, “You know, I’m a part of a community, and I should go out and experience it.”
