Howl isn’t just a movie about a poet and his masterpiece. Judging it as a straight biopic is akin to calling Allen Ginsberg’s four-part treatise “Howl” “void of literary merit”—it just doesn’t do it justice. What filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have done is create a courtroom drama, a biography, a cartoon, and a heady discussion of art and literature in one brief, mesmerizing 90-minute film.

At its core is James Franco in one of the best turns of his career: as Ginsberg, age 29, an unpublished poet debuting “Howl” in a San Francisco cafe, to Ginsberg, age 31, when his work is at the center of an obscenity trial. The bookish Franco (he’s currently getting a PhD in English) studied interviews to master the poet’s mannerisms and tics, his staccato, beatnik style. It’s thrilling to watch. You forget it’s not Ginsberg. Many of those interviews are recreated in the film, with Franco’s Ginsberg in conversation with a faceless interviewer, speaking frankly about everything from his “eight months in the loony bin” to his homosexuality. “Really, I wrote ‘Howl’ for Jack [Kerouac]—I wanted to find a way to entrance him,” he says.

It didn’t quite work on Kerouac, but his poem inspired a nationwide debate about literary merit and freedom of speech in 1957—which plays out in the courtroom as Jon Hamm and David Straitharn exchange barbs about what’s considered profane. No amount of arguing can move you the way the poem itself does, though—it’s read in its entirety in the film, accompanied by Eric Drooker’s beautifully hallucinogenic, Ginsberg-approved animation.

“I was also curious to see how [Eric Drooker] would interpret my work,” Ginsberg said, before he passed in 1997, of his longtime collaboration with the artist. "And I thought that with today’s lowered attention span TV consciousness, this would be a kind of updating of the presentation of my work . . . He really captured that sense of Moloch I was going for in the second section of ’Howl’—‘Moloch whose buildings are judgment!’”  

Howl screens at Northwest Film Forum Oct 29-Nov 4.