Howl

“The Obscenity Trial That Started a Revolution. The Poem That Rocked a Generation.”

A poem is on trial in San Francisco in 1957, and the courtroom has to decide whether it counts as literature or obscenity. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman cut between the trial, a young Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) talking about the years that led him to write it, and animation that gives the poem's lines a picture. Franco reads in the Six Gallery in 1955, and Ginsberg's friends Kerouac and Cassady listen from the crowd.