ANGEL HEADED HIPSTERS: thoughts on Howl (the movie)

Howl starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg is an unusual movie in that instead of taking the standard approach to a biopic and including fictionalized conversations and events, the film makes virtually every second of the film directly off historical record. The film includes a reenactment of the obscenity trial for Howl, an interview with Ginsberg and Ginsberg reading Howl to an animation of the poem. All of which could be in a documentary on Ginsberg. This might be explained by the fact that the filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have previously only worked in documentary film.
Despite how seemingly bland this might sound, this film is constantly riveting. Franco reads the poem well scored with blues music and having a unique musicality and aliveness. The animation too brings the poem alive. The trial seems (at least to me) by the end of listening to the poem like theater of the absurd. Ginsberg's poem seems thoroughly valid and true as you hear Franco read it and discuss it in the interview segments. The interview segments give Ginsberg a chance to explain, almost line by line what drove him to howl. We have fully experienced and had explained the poem. In the end of the film, one realizes that we have truly seen a filmed version of the poem which would seem impossible due to the poems abstract nature. Also at the end of the film, we see Alan Ginsberg in his later years and are shocked by how unlike Franco he looks because by this point we have accepted fully and without doubt, Franco as Ginsberg.