The Kerouac's book is even more pointless, but that's kinda the point itself here. This film is really just your straightforward average "rebellious youth"/Catcher-in-the-Rye-story whereas the book has a more mature side too. In the book, all the actions the people take are in the end just plain meaningless. The whole "rebellion" and sex-drugs-jazz really doesn't give them anything, it isn't a way to "grow as a person" or anything like that like this film seems to suggest. The tone in the book is darker and more cynical and it is definitely worth reading.
Precursor to this whole "Beat literature" with which Kerouac and the others were certainly familiar with was Louis-Ferdinand Céline's book Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night, 1932), which is a similar semi-factual account of wandering days of its author. The narrative spans from the First World War to Colonial Africa, to the Ford factory in Detroit and back to the Paris slum. It is full of all kinds of debauchery, drunken antics of Céline's alter ego Bardamu, sexual encounters with prostitutes, housewifes and country girls, violence and crime, various long and short cons, and racism, sexism and foul language.
Céline really isn't a posterboy for a feelgood Hollywood youth film such as this. He was probably the worst misanthrope in the history of the World, as well as virulently antisemitic and a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of France. Even the Nazis wouldn't publish his antisemitic rants! He obviously had to flee France after the war and could only return after paroled in 1951. Even after the war, he was a Holocaust denier and a far-right activist.
Now, the truth about Kerouac is somewhere between this film's portrayal of him as a liberal hedonistic-individualistic rebel figure and Céline's rather peculiar persona. That should have been more properly depicted.
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