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Although Jack Kerouac's “On the Road” has been praised as a milestone in American literature, this film version brings into question how much of a story it really offers. Kerouac's hero, Sal Paradise, becomes transfixed by the rambling outlaw vision of a charismatic car thief, Dean Moriarity, and joins him in a series of journeys from his mother's apartment in Ozone Park, N.Y., as they crisscross the continent to Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and then back again, until it occurs to Dean “I've never been south.” They turn to Mexico, finding in its long, straight cactus-lined roads, some secret to themselves. They also find marijuana; the two may not be unrelated.

These journeys also yield forth booze, women and jazz — which contain their own secrets, but not simply through the searching for them. Along the way, Dean seeks his dead father and exudes so much charisma that the real Dean, Neal Cassady, is said to be the inspiration for the Beat Generation. Published in 1957, “On the Road” grew not into a movement but into a brand; Kerouac was a frequent guest on talk shows, and the Beats made the cover of Life magazine — a group of Beats seen sitting on a floor next to an LP player, wearing black turtlenecks, dark glasses and a look of intense cool. Compared to the Lost Generation and the Me Generation, the Beats were thin tea.

As a teenager, I snatched up the book in its first paperback edition and chose it above any other to display on my desk at the News-Gazette, sometimes underlining trenchant passages. Still in high school, I slipped away to the Turk's Head, a campus coffee shop, which played Miles Davis and Monk, and Beats were rumored by the townspeople to stand on the tables and recite their poetry, although table-standing seems to run counter to the Beat ethos.

My friends and I, newly in possession of our first $450 cars, talked idly of pointing them west and not stopping until we reached the Pacific. Whether this mission matched Mark Twain's “lighting out for the territory,” you may decide.

The Brazilian director Walter Salles is drawn to the notion of young men on epic journeys of self-discovery; his “ The Motorcycle Diaries ” (2004) involved Che Guevara on a tour of South America that shaped his ideas of South America. In “On the Road,” Kerouac (the British actor Sam Riley ) is more interested in how he was shaped by Dean Moriarty ( Garrett Hedlund ).

Dean in this movie is a rumpled, laconic young man whose fascination for Sal was his inclination to boost cars and set off on journeys to the horizon in search of girls. The girls would be wise to hide when they see these boys coming. Kerouac's wife, Carolyn (known as Camille here and well played by Kirsten Dunst ), is given a scene not long after their child is born. “Dean and I are going out,” Sal tells her. “Want to come along?” “No,” she says, “I'll stay and look after baby.”

Having a second thought on his way out, he pokes his head back through he door: “ At least I asked if you wanted to go.” She fixes him with a Kirsten Dunst glare and says, “I know the look on your face. You're sick of me and you're sick of the baby. Do you realize how much I've given up for you?” No, he doesn't. Is his bond with Sal homosexual at its core? The film itself remains ambiguous.

Their long distance trips become epic, mostly in an unimaginably big and sleek Hudson, later in a beat-up Cadillac, they pass vast empty landscapes, pick up hitchhikers, stop in roadside diners, and on the whole have about as much excitement in San Francisco as you'd expect a couple of broke out-of-towners to experience.

The film's last scene is the payoff we expect. Confronting his typewriter, Sal inserts one end of a very long roll of paper and starts to type: “I first met Dean…”

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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On the Road (2013)

Rated R for strong sexual content, drug use and language

137 minutes

Amy Adams as Jane

Kirsten Dunst as Camille

Sam Riley as Sal

Garrett Hedlund as Dean

Kristen Stewart as Marylou

Directed by

• Walter Salles

Based on the novel by

• Jack Kerouac
• Jose Rivera

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On the Road

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Rent On the Road on Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Prime Video, Apple TV.

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Beautiful to look at but a bit too respectfully crafted, On the Road doesn't capture the energy and inspiration of Jack Kerouac's novel.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Walter Salles

Garrett Hedlund

Dean Moriarty

Sal Paradise

Kristen Stewart

Tom Sturridge

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Review: ‘On the Road’ is achingly romantic

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There are as many visions of “On the Road,” novelist Jack Kerouac’s vivid anthem to the romance of youthful freedom and the getting of experience as there are readers. It’s a book so influential yet so personal that each succeeding generation since its 1957 publication has picked it up and simply said, as one of its protagonists does, “Oh yes, oh yes, that’s the way it goes.”

Director Walter Salles has been one of those enthusiasts since he was an 18-year-old growing up in Brazil under a stifling military dictatorship. Best known for transferring Che Guevara’s “The Motorcycle Diaries” to film, Salles has lovingly crafted a poetic, sensitive, achingly romantic version of the Kerouac book that captures the evanescence of its characters’ existence and the purity of their rebellious hunger for the essence of life.

Salles’ version, finely written by Jose Rivera, who also wrote the “Diaries” script, is more than a tribute to people who have passed into legend. Its re-creation of the adventures of Kerouac alter ego Sal Paradise, his best friend and inspiration Dean Moriarty (based on the legendary Neal Cassady, who went on to drive the Magic Bus for Ken Kesey) and Moriarty’s wife Marylou uses youthful stars like Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart to show how eternal that yearning remains.

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The lure of Kerouac’s legacy as Beat Generation avatar is so strong that any number of other prominent actors, including Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams, Terrence Howard, Steve Buscemi and Viggo Mortensen, signed on for what are essentially supporting roles in part because the book means so much to them.

A major player in the success of “On the Road” is the lyric cinematography, rich in views of the casual beauty of wide-open landscapes shot in all kinds of weather, of French director of photography Eric Gautier, another “Motorcycle Diaries” veteran.

More than just recording scenery, Gautier shot the entire film in a loose, fluid, almost improvisational manner, a visual style that echoes, with good reason, the off-the-cuff feeling of another revolution the Beats influenced, the French New Wave.

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Like a fighter on a diet, “On the Road” has been trimmed by about a quarter of an hour from the version that premiered this year at Cannes. The new edition also opens in a different place, with the movie’s first glimpse of the igniter of dreams and enabler of fantasies, the character modeled on the man Allen Ginsberg called “the car thief ‘Adonis of Denver,’ with his head full of philosophy”: Dean Moriarty.

The year is 1947, and Moriarty (Hedlund) is introduced moving cars around a New York City parking lot with an élan that reveals a level of driving skill that helped him steal 500 cars as a youth. He’d previously spent, we’re told, a third of his young life in pool halls, a third in jail, and a third in the public library, obsessively accumulating knowledge.

The physical manifestation of the life force, Moriarty proved irresistible to the would-be creative types he meets in New York. These include Sal Paradise (Riley, the star of “Control”), a self-described “young writer trying to take off,” and Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) , an aspiring poet and fellow baby hipster based on Ginsberg.

Moriarty has not come to New York alone but with Marylou, his 16-year-old child bride, persuasively played by Stewart (cast by Salles after her performance in “Into the Wild”) who has thrown herself into her role with excellent results.

If there is a breakout performance in “On the Road,” however, it is Hedlund. Previously best known for starring in “Tron: Legacy,” Hedlund hits all the right notes in the difficult role of being all things to all people.

From the moment he appears opening the door to his apartment completely naked, Hedlund projects the intimate yet intensely masculine presence that drew everyone like a flame. It wasn’t just sexual magnetism that’s being conveyed, it’s the quality that Ginsberg noticed in Neal Cassady: “His total generosity of heart was overwhelming.”

Still living with his mother, Paradise the observer is drawn immediately to someone with a formidable will to action, and the two young men immediately bond over stories of their feckless fathers and a joint intoxication with the idea of the camaraderie of the road.

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Paradise says in one of the book’s (and the film’s) most celebrated passages. “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles across the night.”

Episodic by nature like the book, “On the Road” stays with Paradise as he ping-pongs around the country, gathering experiences he painstakingly records in a series of notebooks. Sometimes he’s by himself, sometimes he’s with Moriarty, who is soon dividing his sexual attention among Marylou, the new woman in his life Camille (Dunst) and even Carlo Marx.

One of the hallmarks of Salles and Rivera’s perspective is that even though these characters can be heedless in search of their pleasures, whether it be through sex or drugs, the film never loses sight of how young everyone is, and by implication, how innocent. How long they can live on “the edge of sanity and experience” before a reckoning looms down the road is the question everyone wants to avoid but, finally, no one can.

MPAA rating: R, for strong sexual content, drug use and language

Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes

Playing: At the Landmark Theater, West L.A., and ArcLight, Hollywood

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• DVD & Streaming

On the Road

Content caution.

In Theaters

• December 21, 2012
• Sam Riley as Sal Paradise; Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty; Kristen Stewart as Marylou; Tom Sturridge as Carlo Marx; Kirsten Dunst as Camille; Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee; Amy Adams as Jane; Alice Braga as Terry; Danny Morgan as Ed Dunkle; Elisabeth Moss as Galatea Dunkel

Home Release Date

• August 6, 2013
• Walter Salles

Distributor

Movie review.

In 1951, a young, iconoclastic writer named Jack Kerouac hunkered down and typed for three weeks straight. So infused with passion was Kerouac for his semi-autobiographical novel, On the Road , that he taped pieces of paper together so he wouldn’t have to stop typing—a process as madly manic as the equally manic, devil-may-care exploits his culturally influential story chronicles.

Shortly after the book was published in 1957, Kerouac began to envision bringing it to the big screen. He even invited Marlon Brando to consider starring in it. Brando never responded. Nearly 56 years later, Kerouac’s dream of turning On the Road into a movie has been realized … 44 years after he died at the age of 47 due to alcoholism-induced cirrhosis of the liver.

Kerouac’s story projects him into the earnest, in-the-moment psyche of his literary alter ego Sal Paradise. In the wake of his father’s recent death, Sal has given himself utterly to the idea of being a writer. And to write, one must have experience. And the more experiences one has, the better. If those experiences are extreme, far outside the boundaries of culture’s prevailing norms and mores, so be it.

Sal carries a small notebook with him everywhere he goes, lest he forget anything. And he has lots of opportunities to forget things.

Sal’s muse is an acquaintance named Dean Moriarty. Dean is a beguiling force of nature, working his intoxicating magic on virtually everyone who wanders across his path. When Sal first meets him, Dean has already married a 16-year-old girl from Denver (named Marylou) who’s nearly as wild as Dean is. She’s almost as likely to end up in bed with someone else as Dean is, and she’s eager to roll a joint (or six) when it’s time to party.

Soon Dean, Sal and Marylou find themselves hurtling across the country—on the road, as it were—in Dean’s hulking Hudson. New York. Denver. San Francisco. The deep South. Mexico. And as they go, they draw other would-be thrill seekers into their mobile soiree.

Occasionally they have moments of clarity—such as when Marylou decides she’s had quite enough of Dean. Most of the time, though, Sal, Dean, Marylou and Co. are more interested in carnal pursuits than they are in clarifying just where, exactly, their morality-free journey is actually taking them.

Positive Elements

Marylou divorces Dean—a decision that really can only be seen as a good thing in the context of a rancid relationship that includes him openly having sex with so many other women. In a quiet moment she confesses to Sal that all she really wants is to get married, have a baby and own a home. “You know,” she adds, “something normal. I really do want that.” She eventually takes leave of the nonstop party and does in fact get married (we hear) to a soldier who can give her what she longs for.

Dean gets married again to Camille. Though wild at first, Camille also wearies of Dean’s antics after they have a baby. Twice she tells him to leave and never come back—though at the end she writes him a letter saying that she and their two children would love to spend the rest of their lives with him if he would be willing to return to them in San Francisco. For his part, Dean looks longingly at a picture of his daughter at one point, and he seems genuinely proud to be her daddy. (But his addiction-prone, boundary-demolishing, hedonistic personality makes being a good dad impossible, and soon he’s on the road again.)

Both Dean and Sal have major unresolved father issues that, it could be interpreted, are closely connected to their rebellious attempts to find meaning in life. Dean tells Sal that he sat with a gun to his head for hours, trying to commit suicide, but just couldn’t go through with it. He says he also asked Marylou to shoot him, but she wouldn’t do it either. Obviously, that’s not positive. But it does reveal the fact that once in a great while Dean comes face-to-face with the gaping emptiness inside.

Sal’s friend Old Bull rightly diagnoses Dean as a manipulative taker who will never do anything but use other people to accomplish his narcissistic pursuit of pleasure.

Spiritual Elements

One of Dean and Sal’s good friends is a passionate, gay poet named Carlo, who at one point exclaims that God isn’t “out there,” but that “he’s right here in the dirt. He’s an ape like us.” Carlo later appropriates language related to Jesus’ crucifixion while describing his own struggles, saying he was pierced, that he perished and that he’s since been resurrected. Someone says that our lives our a gift, “the only gift that the Lord never offers us a second time.”

Dean insists that when a jazz saxophonist finds the right zone, the resulting music opens the door to a metaphysical moment. He “hits it,” Dean says, and “time stops,” creating a sense of “infinite feeling.” It’s noted that “Dean drives like Satan.” In Mexico we glimpse Catholic imagery featuring Jesus and Mary.

Sexual Content

On the Road could have just as easily been called On the Bed . It rarely goes more than a handful of minutes before trudging its way into another sex scene of some kind, exposing moviegoers to explicit sexual movements, sounds and breast nudity.

When Sal first meets Dean, Dean’s naked in bed with Marylou (who is topless). They’ve just been having sex. We also see them as a sexual threesome. Marylou kisses both men passionately, and it’s implied that she has sex with each of them. Dean goes into graphic detail describing a foursome. Camille is shown covering her chest after she and Dean have sex.

It’s visually implied that Marylou performs oral sex on Dean while he’s driving. She unzips Sal’s pants to manually stimulate him. She sits naked between Sal and Dean as they drive, manually stimulating both of them at the same time. (All three are naked; we see bare shoulders and movements.) Marylou and another woman coach a third woman to effectively use oral sex to get what she wants from her man.

Carlos says he’s in love with Dean and that they’ve had sex. We see them kiss. When he leaves to go to Africa, he says he hopes to find black men to have similar encounters with. Dean agrees to have sex with an older man for money, an act Sal watches through a partially open door as the camera shows Dean on top of the man making explicit sexual movements.

A guy’s scrotum is visible as he walks around naked. Sal and Dean visit a brothel; sex is implied, and one woman wears a gauzy shirt that reveals her breasts.

Violent Content

Dean drives recklessly throughout the film. When he gets pulled over by a police officer, he spits, “I wish I had a f‑‑‑ing gun.”

Crude or Profane Language

About 15 f-words and close to that many s-words. Other vulgarities (used several times each) include “a‑‑,” h‑‑‑,” “b‑‑ch” and “p‑‑‑.” We hear many crude references to both the male and female anatomy, and one obscene slang term for someone who performs oral sex. God’s name is misused six or eight times, often with “d‑‑n.” Jesus’ name is abused two or three.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Characters drink and smoke—alternately marijuana and cigarettes—in virtually every scene. They sometimes do so while driving. In Mexico, Sal and Dean share a marijuana joint that’s the size of a small banana.

Twice characters abuse the (now defunct) prescription drug Benzedrine, which involves breaking open a dispenser of the amphetamine inhaler and putting the drug-drenched strip of paper inside on their tongues for a stimulant high.

Other Negative Elements

Dean, Sal and Marylou steal food from convenience stores. Dean steals a car.

Dean abandons Sal in a Mexican hotel room when Sal’s very sick with dysentery. Later, Sal refuses to help Dean, who’s clearly drunk, destitute and homeless when he shows up unexpectedly in New York City (after Sal has begun to have some success as a writer).

Hitchhiking is just something you casually do when you don’t have a vehicle of your own. And during a ride in the back of a farm truck, several men urinate off the back.

On the Road is considered by some to be one of the most important American novels of the 20th century. After its publication, Jack Kerouac would become one of the most significant figures of the Beat Generation, a group of writers including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs whose countercultural ethos would pave the way for the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

As influential as Kerouac’s work might have been, however, his vision of unbridled hedonism here is ultimately a devastating dead end. In pursuit of “truth” and experience, Kerouac’s characters deny themselves nothing. The good life is defined as one with no boundaries or limitations or responsibilities. In practical terms, mostly that means having as much sex and ingesting as many drugs and different alcoholic beverages as possible in pursuit of liberation from conventional society’s perceived constrictions.

It’s telling, of course, that each of these people ends up in bondage. That the only ones who perhaps attain a modicum of real meaning and freedom are Marylou and Camille, who eventually realize that the hedonistic way of life they’ve embraced leaves them with nothing.

Not that Kerouac (or the makers of the movie) wanted this to be a cautionary tale. Because as bleak and grungy as this film is, it’s crystal clear that Sal refuses to regret any of the experiences he’s so diligently chronicled. Ultimately, he seems unwilling to admit how empty his way of life is—and he doesn’t want his audience to go there either.

A postscript: Ordinarily, gritty, explicit independent fare like On the Road doesn’t gain much traction at the mainstream, mall-based box office. This film, however, stars Kristen Stewart as Marylou, which may lure a generation of  Twilight fans to see what their beloved Bella is up to in her latest role. Hopefully this review’s notations of exactly what she is up to will help families navigate that.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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Movie Review: On the Road Is a Rambling, Beautiful Museum Piece

Walter Salles and Jose Rivera’s adaptation of On the Road begins with the sound of one quick breath, and it’s hard not to read the movie that follows as occurring within the space of the next one. Fast, almost too fast, their film of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel is a dizzying cinematic corollary to the writer’s rhythmic, free-flowing prose. On the Road has its problems, but at times it’s hard not to feel like you’re witnessing a glorious magic trick: a movie that does some basic level of justice to one of the most unfilmable of American literary masterworks.

Kerouac’s book was as much a veiled autobiography as a dazzling, stream-of-consciousness tightrope-walk, and in Salles and Rivera’s telling, the actors here are playing the real-life figures as much as they’re playing the fictional alter egos. As Sal Paradise (the Kerouac stand-in), Sam Riley, who made such a tormented and almost creepy Ian Curtis in the Joy Division biopic Control , is both turned-in and wide-eyed, an introvert who wants to light out for the territory. He’s the child of immigrants, but he’s caught the American bug of craving the openness and possibility of the road. As Dean Moriarty (the Neal Cassady stand-in), Garrett Hedlund is the opposite: He’s a physically confident all-American type, with a sexual appetite that’s positively Neo-classical. But you sense that part of it’s an act, and it is: He confides to Sal that he sometimes sits in his car with a gun pointed at his temple.

In Kerouac’s telling, these guys were the fresh-faced explorers of a new world, but Salles emphasizes something more elemental and constant about them. They’re two young men in search of lost fathers — Sal’s has just died, and Dean’s is homeless. He also brings to the fore the women in their lives. Dean is married to 16-year-old anything-goes siren Marylou, played by Kristen Stewart, who gives probably the best performance of her career, displaying a physicality that has been sorely lacking from her repertoire. As Camille, the girl Dean later also marries, Kirsten Dunst does a similarly impressive job, conveying a kind of bitter vulnerability. The freewheeling back-and-forth between these characters, which crisscrosses years and geographies, is intoxicating, and you feel at times like the director has placed you in their half-baked, inspired headspaces.

Stylistically, the film is both lush and unhinged. The camera seems to never stop twirling, cuts sometimes flow and sometimes jump; dialogue goes from melancholy to manic in the space of an edit. It all feels right, in a sense. But at the same time, Salles has a practically insurmountable task ahead of him: how to be faithful to a revolutionary work of the fifties without turning it into a musty period piece? Here, there are no real good choices. For many years, Francis Ford Coppola (who executive-produced this) wanted to make On the Road on 16mm, in handheld newsreel style, to recapture the immediacy of the moment. That probably wouldn’t have worked, either.

Salles is a sensualist and very much a traditionalist when it comes to his cinema; that’s kind of what we like about him, actually. He and Rivera also collaborated on the young Che Guevara road movie The Motorcycle Diaries , and they bring to this one a similarly reflective quality; you wouldn’t expect a film of On the Road to be nostalgic, but it is. Even as they forge their new future, you sense the characters feeling wistful for something ineffable they may be leaving behind. Maybe that’s because they’re not all bound to find the things they seek: Yes, Sal will become Jack, the great American literary icon, but Dean will become Neal, the inspiration for many great Beat works but also a man whom greatness eluded. Their past together, it turns out, is the fondest thing they had. In other words, this is not the film of a young man. Salles hasn’t reinvented On the Road , but rather turned it into a rambling, beautiful, and occasionally even heartbreaking museum piece.

• on the road
• movie review
• kristen stewart
• walter salles
• garrett hedlund
• jack kerouac

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[ This is a re-post of my review from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.  On the Road opens today in limited release. ]

Jack Kerouac 's On the Road is a novel that inspired a generation of restless young men and women to break free from their comfort zones, broaden their horizons, and look to the majesty of America. Walter Salles ' On the Road is a film adaptation that will inspire a generation of lazy high school kids to watch the movie instead of reading the book. Salles snaps up the words of Kerouac's novel, but not their spirit. The movie shouldn't simply regurgitate the book because adaptation should be a work of inspiration and not imitation. But there's nothing inspired about Salles' picture. It's safe where it should be dangerous. It's lugubrious when it should be explosive. It's derivative when it should be daring. Despite glimmers of an emotionally moving story, On the Road rarely has the energy to get up and bravely venture forth beyond the plot constraints of a book that's not driven by its plot.

In its broad strokes, On the Road explores the relationship between aspiring writer Sal Paradise ( Sam Riley ) and the freewheeling Dean Moriarty ( Garrett Hedlund ). To become a better writer, Sal decides to crisscross the country. One trip he goes solo, another trip he goes with Dean and Dean's ex-wife Marylou ( Kristen Stewart ), and on another trip he and Dean head south to Mexico. There are brief interludes at various destinations where the characters drink, get high, and screw around, but no one can ever settle down when the road is calling.

But there's no wisdom or insight to be found on the road in On the Road . Kerouac's novel inspires a sense of wanderlust in the reader. It makes us want to leave our stolid lives behind, and dive into the unknown because we know we'll be richer for the experience. But Salles' picture has all the urgency of a slideshow where your friends show you pretty pictures of landscapes and tell you of the crazy times they had. We're not a participant in their travels, nor are we particularly fascinated by the events they experience. Film should transport us into other worlds, and On the Road wants to keep us in our seats so we can watch characters be physically transported.

Their transportation is rarely emotional or spiritual. On the Road may have been an impossible adaptation because the energy is in Kerouac's syntax and vocabulary. He's constantly taking literary chances, and when he fails he does so in a big brash fashion (like when he tries to re-create the power of jazz by writing effusively about it; if Jazz' power could be reproduced through description alone, it would cease to be powerful). Salles hardly takes any chances beyond letting his camera drift listlessly alongside the characters. Occasionally, he'll find a beautiful shot like cutting across landscapes and weather through a unique camera angle. But it's almost as if Salles is trying to copy his previous film, The Motorcycle Diaries , but the style no longer clicks. Curiously, there are flashes when Salles and his characters cut loose and intimacy creeps into the picture. We feel the body heat and the passion as Dean and Marylou drunkenly dance at a party. Sadly, these moments are few and far between. Without verve and vigor, On the Road is about as electric as a liquor commercial.

Salles receives no help from his cast despite having such talented forces as Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams , and Kirsten Dunst in supporting roles. The script never spends enough time with the Old Bull Lee (Mortensen) and his wife Jane (Adams) or Dean's wife, Camille (Dunst). They're merely road markers on the languid journey of Sal and Dean. At least Riley's raspy voice adds some color to Sal, but there could perhaps be no greater miscasting than Hedlund as Dean Moriarty. Salles isn't obligated to directly copy the character from the book, but Dean is written as a restless and rambunctious figure because his personality fits with the travels Sal hopes to take. Through Hedlund's performance, Dean is nothing but a cool cat who occasionally jumps around. The opening and closing narration (quoting from the novel) present Dean Moriarty as a quasi-mythical figure who could drive the timid to follow his lead. Hedlund's Moriarty is a laid-back guy who'd like to bum a smoke or borrow a few bucks. As for Stewart, it's tough to say she's miscast since her role has been "expanded" in that Marylou is in more of the story, but her role is just to be a sex object.

These kinds of expansions, which also include pushing Dean's bisexuality and the unrequited homosexual love of his friend Carlo Marx ( Tom Sturridge ), don't add to the story or the world (although they will prove invaluable to teachers hoping to spot which of their students only saw the movie). A storyteller can't add to his story when he doesn't know what the story is meant to convey. On the Road is a case study in showing how a novel's setting, plot, characters, and dialogue can be emulated in a movie, but still be devoid of the magic, overwhelming, and indefinable "IT."

• Viggo Mortensen
• Kristen Stewart

On the Road

Where to Watch

Sam Riley (Sal Paradise) Garrett Hedlund (Dean Moriarty) Kristen Stewart (Marylou) Amy Adams (Jane) Tom Sturridge (Carlo Marx) Alice Braga (Terry) Elisabeth Moss (Galatea Dunkel) Danny Morgan (Ed Dunkle) Kirsten Dunst (Camille) Viggo Mortensen (Old Bull Lee)

Walter Salles

Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly.

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On the Road

Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each ... Read all Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly. Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly.

• Walter Salles
• Jack Kerouac
• Jose Rivera
• Garrett Hedlund
• Kristen Stewart
• 162 User reviews
• 249 Critic reviews
• 56 Metascore
• 2 wins & 4 nominations

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• Sal Paradise …

• Dean Moriarty …

• Carlo Marx …

• Galatea Dunkel …

• Ed Dunkle …

• Old Bull Lee …
• Oaxacan Girl

• Newlywed Woman

• Chevy Owner
• Terry's Father

• Newlywed Man

• Walter's Wife
• (as Tetchena Bellange)
• Denver Police
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia There have been many previous attempts to get the film made since the 1950s. Author Jack Kerouac sought to have himself play Sal Paradise opposite Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty. In 1990, Francis Ford Coppola was set to direct with Ethan Hawke as Sal, Winona Ryder as Marylou and Brad Pitt as Dean. Later, Joel Schumacher was attached to direct with Billy Crudup as Sal and Colin Farrell as Dean. Gus Van Sant was later involved as a potential director.
• Goofs In the opening scenes, Sal Paradise hitches a ride on the old farm truck. The large, round hay and straw bales in the background weren't available until 1972, when Vermeer built and sold the model 605 baler. Even then, the bales were much smaller and looser until the late '70s or early '80s on United States farms.

Sal Paradise : The only people for me are the mad ones, 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.

• Alternate versions The film was re-edited for North American release following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and its French theatrical release because, according to director Walter Salles, that version was "rushed". The new cut is thirteen minutes shorter but contains more scenes and Salles says he has no preference between the two.
• Connections Featured in At the Movies: Cannes Film Festival 2012 (2012)
• Soundtracks That's It Composed and produced by Gustavo Santaolalla

User reviews 162

• generationofswine
• Oct 11, 2012
• How long is On the Road? Powered by Alexa
• When Sal, Dean, Carlo and the girl were having a party at about the 20-minute mark, Dean was breaking up inhalers to soak the wicks in liquid for them to drink to take as drugs. What was the drug in the wicks? Benzedrine?
• Is this the first film adaptation of 'On the Road'?
• May 23, 2012 (France)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Facebook
• Official site
• Đường Đời Sa Ngã
• Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina (uncredited)
• MK2 Productions
• American Zoetrope
• Jerry Leider Company
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $25,000,000 (estimated)
• Dec 23, 2012

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 4 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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On The Road Review

12 Oct 2012

137 minutes

On The Road

The trouble with adapting Beat writing is that it is exactly that: writing. What Jack Kerouac did was stretch what was permissible in the field of literature, assembling a coherent novel from the syncopated slang of the city streets. If Walter Salles had really wanted to pay homage to Kerouac’s landmark 1957 novel, he would have tried to find a visual equivalent for his urgent, heady style written in amphetamine-fuelled sessions. Instead, the film is desperately conservative, a period-precise cover version of all the book’s main events.

To remind us, then, that this is the On The Road, Salles resorts quite often to voiceover from Sam Riley’s Sal Paradise, the blocked, provincial writer who finds inspiration in the free-spirited hustler Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund). Salles gets this relationship the most nearly-right of everything here, largely thanks to Hedlund’s charismatic performance, but also due to Salles’ willingness to accept the sexuality that drives Sal’s curiosity. It stops prudishly short of the definite homoerotic aspects that tinge almost all Beat writing, but, in terms of equal-opportunity nudity, On The Road is about as frank an adap as we could wish for. Kristen Stewart, as Moriarty’s jailbait lover and teen wife Marylou, is especially game, given that her character gets to show more skin than personality.

Likewise, the drug use is not sanitised — Sal and co. puff openly on herbal cigarettes and wantonly abuse benzedrine inhalers — and the effects of a sex, drugs and free-form jazz lifestyle are seen as positive in moderation. So why, then, doesn’t it really quite work? Put simply, time has not been kind to Kerouac’s book, just as it was positively cruel to him. Though Salles has tried to modern it up a little, the fact remains that this is simply a highfalutin bromance, with big, bold, meaty roles for the menfolk — including a scene-stealing turn from Viggo Mortensen as the Burroughs-esque Old Bull Lee — and precious little for their women to do except follow the boys round and clean up after them. And when those underused women include Amy Adams and Kirsten Dunst, you really have to wonder about the source material.

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