Go Moan For Man: The Literary Odyssey of Jack Kerouac

Film review written and copyrighted by Dave Moore

The long-awaited documentary movie "Go Moan For Man" premiered in Orlando, Florida in October 1999, and is now set for general release. Shooting began in 1982, at the Kerouac Conference in Boulder, Colorado, with all the famous Beat luminaries in attendance. In the seventeen intervening years filmmaker Doug Sharples and his sound-recordist wife Judi traveled some 50,000 miles from their South Dakota home, on a shoe-string budget, to capture Kerouac's steps across three continents. Their efforts have paid off, and we are fortunate to have, in "Go Moan For Man", the definitive Kerouac documentary.

The movie runs for more than two hours and divides into three clear sections. The first, lasting twenty minutes, is a recreation of Kerouac's travels as told in On the Road, with actor Bill Mabon portraying Kerouac in black & white sequences without dialogue, the narration throughout being in the gravel voice of Don Lane, while Kerouac's written words are read effectively by Peter Lownds. In this section, many of the places described by Kerouac in his early travels are revisited with evocative shots in full colour, including smaller locations such as Stuart, Iowa, and Shelton, Nebraska, as well as the Burroughs house outside of New Orleans where Jack and Neal visited in 1949. With maps detailing the routes taken, this section provides a useful entry into Kerouac's world, particularly for those who may be familiar only with his most popular book, the original scroll version of which is also shown.

Section two, the longest, is a complete biographical tour through Kerouac's life and work. Again, Bill Mabon portrays Jack, and other actors play the parts of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, in small inserts which help to detail the story told by others, including poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Ed Sanders, and writers John Clellon Holmes, John Montgomery, and Ken Kesey. Other contributors include Jack's wives Edie Parker and Stella Sampas, daughter Jan Kerouac, and lovers Carolyn Cassady and Joyce Johnson, as well as the real-life Ginsberg and Burroughs. Biographers and scholars Ann Charters, Dennis McNally, John Tytell, Gerald Nicosia, Douglas Brinkley, and Roger Brunelle talk about Kerouac's importance as a writer, and John and Jim Sampas discuss other Kerouac titles due to be published in the future.

Locations depicted in this section include Desolation Peak, Mexico, Tangier, France and England, and also most of the Kerouac homes in Lowell, New York, North Carolina and Florida. It's the most complete documentation of Kerouac's travels yet captured on film, and easy to see how it could only be completed as time and finances permitted.

The final forty minutes comprise footage shot at the Kerouac Conference in Boulder, and include actual panel discussions as well as private interviews with the many colleagues of Kerouac's who attended, for a broader discussion of his work and influence on others. All in all, this is a most important movie about Kerouac, accessible to both the newcomer to his work as well as the seasoned enthusiast, and packed full of fascinating new information and images for both. Do catch it when it comes your way.

Doug and Judi Sharples can be contacted at: Real Films, P.O. Box 476, Wakonda, SD 57073. Tel: 605-267-2859. Fax: 605-267-2017. E-mail: moan@RealFilms.net