More an extended Urban Outfitters advertisement than an essay on, or into, the exciting experiments of Beat Cinema.

It's not a wreck of a movie; it's not a sleek race car either. But there's heat to be felt here.

Walter Salles's warm but strangely staid adaptation of a piece of literature that was never meant to be tamed as cinema.

Salles approaches Kerouac's raw, restless, and spontaneous work in such a staid and conservative manner that the movie might as well be a lesser Merchant-Ivory production from the team's late-'90s period of decline.