10 great films about beatniks and the Beat generation

Hot on the heels of his sexually charged tennis drama Challengers, Luca Guadagnino unveiled his new film Queer at the Venice Film Festival in September. Starring Daniel Craig, it’s an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ autobiographical novel, which documents the writer’s queer experience in Mexico City during the 1940s.

Burroughs’ experimental writing, with its unreliable narrators and ‘cut-up’ texts, has had a huge influence on film, literature and music. During an interview with Rolling Stone in 1993, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain appeared in an unusually upbeat mood and claimed that his current happiness was based on: “My family. My child. Meeting William S. Burroughs and doing a record with him.” David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and Debbie Harry have all cited Burroughs as an influence on their art.

Burroughs and his contemporaries Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg belonged to a group of writers and poets who became known as the Beats. This label would inspire the expression ‘beatnik’, a term mostly used by the press to describe a 1950s pre-hippy type who read poetry, listened to jazz and spoke in a ‘hip’ vernacular.

Controversy was often closely linked to Burroughs’ work. Junkie, published in 1953, detailed his personal experiences of living with a morphine and heroin habit. He was unashamed and candid about taking opiates and openly recounted tales of crimes he committed to support his addiction; the book still makes for hard-hitting reading today.

Here are 10 films that explore beatnik characters and the Beat generation.

Director: John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes’ Shadows is the epitome of ‘Beat’ generation cinema. A huge influence on Mike Leigh, the film features improvised dialogue and is scored by the legendary double bass player Charles Mingus. Shadows tells the story of three Black American siblings – Ben, Hugh and Leila – living in 1950s New York. Hugh is a traditional jazz singer struggling for work while his younger brother Ben dreams of being a jazz trumpeter. However, Ben doesn’t appear devoted to his craft, preferring to booze and wax lyrical about ‘Bird’ (the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker) – he blows a lot of hot air rather than his trumpet.

The sounds of bebop jazz influenced the flow and style of Beat writers like Kerouac and Ginsberg. Kerouac, who penned the 1957 beatnik bible On the Road, referred to his writing as “spontaneous prose”, using free-flowing sentences in a stream of consciousness fashion. Shadows ends with the credit, “The film you have just seen was an improvisation.” Although not entirely true (some of it was scripted), it suggests that, like the Beats, Cassavetes was taking inspiration from jazz’s extemporisation.

Director: Edmond T. Gréville

There’s clearly more than a nod to American teenage rebellion dramas like The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) in this British beatnik drama. Exasperated with her father’s marriage to a younger woman, the film’s protagonist Jennifer (Gillian Hills) throws herself headfirst into the culture around Soho’s late night jazz bars. One scene showcases a young Oliver Reed dancing wildly with Jennifer in a nightclub. Reed is credited in the film as ‘Man in Plaid shirt.’

The musical score young Ollie is bopping around to was composed by John Barry, who would go on to create the theme music to James Bond. Beat Girl was Barry’s first ever cinematic commission, and ‘Made You’ – a track he co-wrote with Trevor Peacock (who in the 90s played the mumbling Jim Trott in Richard Curtis’s sitcom The Vicar of Dibley) – would reach number 11 in the singles chart. It was subsequently sampled by Fatboy Slim on his 1998 track ‘Rockafeller Skank’. Over a decade later, Gillian Hills, who played Jennifer, would have a small but significant role in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971), as a woman charmed into having group sex with Malcom McDowell’s malevolent Alex DeLarge.

Director: Guy Hamilton

Set in 1960s Chelsea, The Party’s Over follows Carson, a clean-cut all American boy on the hunt for his missing fiancée who has disappeared after running off with a group of wild British beatniks led by Moise (played by a menacing, cigar smoking Oliver Reed). In a similar fashion to the rural pagan Scots in The Wicker Man (1973), these horrible hipsters use diversionary tactics to gaslight and confuse Carson’s search for his missing loved one.

The film was shot in 1963, but its release was delayed by two years due to scenes of “implied necrophilia”. The Party’s Over was described as being “unpleasant, tasteless and rather offensive” by John Trevelyn, the Secretary of the Board of the BBFC. Three rounds of cuts were enforced before it was finally released in 1965 and slapped with an X certificate. Director Guy Hamilton, who directed four James Bond movies, had his name removed from the final credits in protest against the restrictions the BBFC enforced on his movie.

Director: John Byrum

Heartbeat is based on the autobiographical novel by Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Neal Cassady, a key figure in the Beat movement and a friend of both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. The film stars Nick Nolte as Neal and Sissy Spacek as Carolyn. Carolyn’s memoir chronicles the complicated relationship between the couple and Kerouac (played by John Heard), who were entangled in a bohemian love triangle.

This Jules et Jim with jazz didn’t make much of a splash when it was released. Critic Roger Ebert slammed the film, expressing reservations about the effect of the film’s careful recreation of the period: “The movie’s a triumph of art direction, all right; the locations, clothes, lighting, moods, music and whole tone of the performances are designed to lower a kind of nostalgic dropcloth over the story.” Allen Ginsberg was so suspicious of the film that he refused his name to be used in the script. Instead, a character that appears to be based on him is called Ira.

Director: Howard Brookner

Director Howard Brookner began shooting this documentary as part of his thesis at New York University. A young Jim Jarmusch, who was also at NYU at the time, worked on it as a sound recordist. Near the end of production, the BBC approached Brookner and offered funding to help complete the film, leading to it being aired as part of the BBC Arena series.

One important interview in the film is with Burroughs’ son, William Burroughs Jr, which demystifies the writer somewhat and suggests that while he may have been an incredible author he probably wasn’t a very pleasant man. Burroughs Jr appears fairly briefly and explains that he was raised mostly by his grandparents due to a “horrible accident”, referring to the episode when Burroughs allegedly killed his mother, Joan Volmer, while trying to shoot a shot glass off the top of her head. Burroughs Jr would never patch things up with his father and died an early death caused by health complications from drug and alcohol addiction. Before he died he wrote an article for Esquire magazine claiming that his father had ruined his life.

Director: Gus Van Sant

Matt Dillon stars as the leader of a group of outlaw junkies who travel the country robbing chemists for prescription opiates in this 1989 film directed by Gus Van Sant. Burroughs was enlisted to play Tom the Priest, an older addict who spouts philosophy and offers advice to Dillon’s character almost like an Obi-Wan Kenobi of drug abuse and crime.

Despite being 75 at the time of filming, Burroughs was still using drugs regularly. Van Sant would have to score cannabis for him, which he smoked before his scenes with Dillon, believing that it helped him to remember his lines. Actor Laurie Parker claimed that Burroughs was also still addicted to hard drugs at the time, with cast and crew often having to call a heroin dealer with a sinister nickname: “Burroughs was ill one day, he was sick, and he had to get well. And ‘getting well’ meant that you needed some heroin or methadone or whatever. We had Satan on speed dial. He was a drug dealer with a Hell’s Angels kind of vibe, and we would drop by his house and score from him.”

Director: David Cronenberg

Canadian body-horror auteur David Cronenberg stated he decided to “Throw the book away” when he began adapting William S. Burroughs infamous novel Naked Lunch. Written by Burroughs during his time spent in the International Zone in Tangiers, Morocco during the 1950s, Naked Lunch is a disjointed, disturbing novel that was almost banned for obscenity in the United States. Due to its fragmented narrative, it was thought to be an unfilmable book.

Cronenberg deviated widely from the book’s original narrative and injected biographical events from Burroughs’ life into the film. His version opens with protagonist Bill Lee (played by the RoboCop actor Peter Weller) working as an insect exterminator, a job that the author held in the 1940s. As in his remake of The Fly in 1986, Cronenberg would again use grotesque, insectoid props in Naked Lunch. One such creature is a Kafkaesque cockroach crossed with a typewriter. Speaking from a sphincter-like orifice underneath its wings, the creature barks orders at Burroughs, tormenting him until he finally smashes it to death with his shoe.

Director: Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel

Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, The Junky’s Christmas is a stop-motion animated adaptation of ‘The Priest They Called Him’, a short story from Burroughs’ 1973 collection Exterminator! The protagonist, Danny, is a heroin user going through a gruelling cold turkey on Christmas Day, when the streets of New York are quiet and empty. Burroughs also created a version of this story with Kurt Cobain, reciting it over a chaotic cocktail of distorted guitars. When he first met Cobain, Burroughs expressed concern about the singer’s state of mind to his assistant, saying: “There’s something wrong with that boy, he frowns for no good reason.”

After struggling all day, Danny manages to procure some drugs from a ‘croaker’ (old American slang for a crooked doctor). However, instead of using them he gives the dose to his neighbour, a young boy suffering in pain from kidney stones. Returning to his bedroom drugless and about to face the full force of a withdrawal, he is suddenly, out of nowhere, inebriated from the effects of heroin and cocaine. Danny’s good deed earned him what Burroughs describes as an “immaculate fix” from God.

Director: Walter Salles

For years a film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road seemed unlikely to happen. Back in the 1950s the writer had written to Marlon Brando asking him to star in the film as Dean Moriarty (Kerouac’s fictionalised version of his friend Neal Cassady) alongside himself as the main character. He never got a response. Francis Ford Coppola acquired the rights to the film in 1980, but couldn’t make it work.

Decades later, after watching the Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) at the Cannes Film Festival, Coppola asked the director Walter Salles if he’d be interested in adapting the book. As The Motorcycle Diaries had some strong similarities with On the Road, Salles seemed like the perfect choice. However, the results – starring Kristen Stewart and Sam Riley – were met with lukewarm praise on its release, and critics didn’t think it captured the essence of Kerouac’s writing. But while it might not be not be a spot-on adaptation, Viggo Mortensen’s cameo as a gun-toting William S. Burroughs makes it more than worthwhile.

Director: John Krokidas

Kill Your Darlings’ focal character is the poet Allen Ginsberg as he begins his freshman year at Columbia University in 1944. Daniel Radcliffe injects a boyish eagerness into the performance, with elements of the coming-of-age genre spilling into this Beat-inspired story. We meet a fresh-faced Ginsberg as he gleefully discovers jazz and forges friendships with Kerouac, Burroughs and Lucien Carr, the young aesthete to whom Ginsberg would eventually dedicate his celebrated poem ‘Howl’. 

Dane DeHaan portrays Carr as an unpredictable and charming young student, with echoes of Richard E. Grant’s unemployed alcoholic actor Withnail in the 1987 film Withnail & I. One night, after drinking with Kerouac, Carr was confronted by David Kammerer (played with needy intensity by Michael C. Hall), an older man who was infatuated with him. After rejecting his advances, Carr stabbed Kammerer and threw him into the Hudson River. Kill Your Darlings revisits this dark chapter in Beat history in fictionalised form, giving us a brutally realistic account from Burroughs and a poetic interpretation from Ginsberg.