Walter Salles has brought to Cannes a good-looking but directionless and self-adoring road movie, based on the 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac. It's comparable to Salles's 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries about the early adventures of Che Guevara and his buddy Alberto Granado – but there the travellers were learning to think and care about people other than themselves. This really isn't the case with the heroes of On the Road, who strenuously insist on how passionate and life-affirming they are, with dozens of self-consciously staged parties, in which the characters heroically swig from bottles, smoke joints, have sex and become narcissistic, flatulent and boring in a way that isn't entirely intentional.
The journey across America is part of the literary education of budding writer Sal Paradise, played by Sam Riley, and everyone has a reverence for the written word; Salles's camera periodically lingers, solemnly, on the covers of books by Arthur Schopenhauer and Marcel Proust and one character even reads joylessly aloud from Swann's Way.
In the late 1940s, Sal's father has just died; he hangs out with the striving, gabbling Ginsbergian poet Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) in various hipster dives, but is himself blocked as a writer and wondering what to do with his life. Then everything is turned around by meeting Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), a wild free spirit, a wanderer taking odd jobs and turning tricks: at their first meeting, Dean opens the door to him stark naked. He seems gloriously unfettered by the boring bonds of hearth and home; he is a hobo of the mind and spirit, just taking off when and where he pleases, drinking life to the very dregs. He is with his gorgeous 16-year-old bride Marylou, played by Kristen Stewart, but seems to have many other quasi-conjugal ties around the country that he is not too worried about. Fascinated and inspired by this freewheeling alpha-male, Sal himself hits the road, sometimes with Dean, sometimes without, scribbling notes for a book.
Sal has a sort of homoerotic bond with Dean, which is displaced into their mutual infatuation with Marylou, but there is never any sense that he genuinely cares for Marylou, or is interested in her. Other friends and acquaintances join them on the road, and we become aware that while the guys are heading for the hills, they have in almost every case left a woman behind, fuming. Camille (Kirsten Dunst) finally throws Dean out on his ear; Galatea (Elisabeth Moss) rages at her errant husband – and the women's anger, though shrill and futile, has a kind of real life that the bland, self-admiring male voyagers do not. Marylou herself is endlessly tolerant. Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams have eccentric cameos as Old Bull Lee and Jane, a couple who give houseroom to the travellers.
On the Road does, ultimately, have a touching kind of sadness in showing how poor Dean is becoming just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot. But this real sadness can't pierce or dissipate this movie's tiresome glow of self-congratulation.
