A mash-up of docudrama, animation and literature, Howl is a bold attempt to get at the heart of not only a seminal poem, but also the writer who burst forth from its creation. In their first non-documentary film, the team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman create a mixed media portrait of the formative experiences of poet Allen Ginsberg, which includes homosexual relationships with revered figures of the Beat generation and an obscenity trial for the publisher of Howl and Other Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. With these hot-button issues, what's most surprising is how calm, cool and collected their Howl is, taking its cues from the soft-spoken performance of James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, who learns that his powerful words don't need volume to have an impact.

Epstein won his first Oscar for The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and a second with Friedman for Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), both very straightforward documentaries about important moments in gay life and American history. Howl is structured with four parallel narratives to illuminate the story of how that singularly complex text came into being. First is reenactment: Allen Ginsberg takes the stage at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955 to unleash Howl, reading it publicly for the first time, with Franco capturing his distinct cadence and gentle exhortations. That receptive audience includes inspirations Jack Kerouac (Todd Rotondi) and Neal Cassady (Jon Prescott), lover Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit) and an entranced Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Then there's distillation: highlights of The People v. Ferlinghetti, the 1957 trial of the City Lights publisher (Andrew Rogers), charged with selling obscene material. With the conservative Judge Clayton Horn (Bob Balaban) presiding and prosecutor Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn) focusing on salacious passages and openly advocating that regular folks should be shielded from such an insidious agenda, defense attorney Jake Ehrlich (Jon Hamm) seems to have an uphill battle. He has to prove, in essence, the literary value of outsider art that uses a familiar form to express radically different viewpoints. The filmmakers create a pitched verbal battle discussing the worth and veracity of Ginsberg's words, after they're taken from the realm of performance and put into the permanence of print.

Next is a kind of creative interviewing, whereby a bearded Allen Ginsberg is having a long conversation with a barely glimpsed journalist in his New York City apartment later in 1957. Epstein and Friedman edited a number of actual transcripts to create this compilation conversation, which they've staged during a period when Ginsberg was said to have done an in-depth interview with Time, although no profile appeared. In the intimate small space, with measured tones, Allen unearths painful revelations, and James Franco reveals a wholly different Ginsberg. Gone is the jittery youth from flashbacks with Kerouac and Cassady, or even the emerging poet at the Six Gallery: Franco now displays the comfortable shuffle and easy charm of the confident hippie to come.

The final element is the animation of Eric Drooker, the go for broke, love it or hate it aspect that Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have described as "a Beat Fantasia." Where so much of Howl feels careful and measured, these segments come off as outright flights of fancy — anarchic bursts of expressive, often carnal images. Drooker worked with Ginsberg on the collection Illuminated Poems before the poet's death in 1997, and achieves the same bold style here. (It's reproduced in a new Howl graphic novel.) The problem isn't the mix of genres: the filmmakers expertly jump from courtroom to apartment to gallery to Drooker's sequences to demonstrate how Ginsberg's life influenced his work. It's that the literal nature of the animation's imagery blunts the impact of the poem.

One of the tactics used by prosecuting attorney Ralph McIntosh was to grill the expert witnesses over specific passages in Howl. (McIntosh and Jake Erlich had already faced off on another high-profile obscenity trial involving Howard Hughes and his 1943 film The Outlaw.) He asks San Francisco Examiner book critic Luther Nichols (Alessandro Nivola) to expound on Ginsberg's double entendres, and Professor Mark Schorer (Treat Williams) of the University of California at Berkeley to define oblique references and literary allusions. "Sir, you can't translate poetry into prose," Schorer tells McIntosh, "that's why it is poetry." Translating poetry into animation — even images as beautifully Blakeian and Ginsberg sanctioned as Drooker's — also denies individual interpretation.

The entirety of Howl is read throughout the course of this brief (85 minute) film, which is densely packed with information about the price of rebellion in a buttoned-down era. It comes off best during the Six Gallery sequences because of the crackling energy in the room: adrenaline propelling a nervous Ginsberg from the first hesitant lines of this personal epic to his own "holy" litany conclusion; and emanating from an audience transfixed by the ambitious poem, who knowingly cheer at insider references to the details of their subterranean existence. But most of the poem is heard over Eric Drooker's animation, the words competing with Carter Burwell's overly insistent electronic score like narration for the action, instead of being the raison d'être for the whole shebang.

The recently ubiquitous, media savvy James Franco as Allen Ginsberg may seem an odd choice but he's spot-on, fully sinking into the poet's particular grooves and exuding the engaging aloofness of someone rattling around in their own head. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have populated the film with other actors who are comfortable in the period, like David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck) and Jon Hamm, whose soothing, carefully modulated voice and forceful presence are familiar to viewers of Mad Men. What initially feels like a too safe casting choice in Hamm turns very interesting when he's pitted against a formidable Jeff Daniels as prosecution witness David Kirk, an English professor at the University of San Diego who's rigid in his outright dismissal of Howl.

Their barbed exchange revolves around whether or not Howl has literary merit, and as Jake Erlich grows more commanding while David Kirk becomes more flustered, it's not difficult to see why the polished attorney earned a suitable nickname: The Master. But this encounter is also about a particular American vision and how it chafed against the morality of its time. As maker of the commercial product — the printer and seller of a physical book called Howl — Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced criminal charges, but it was poet Allen Ginsberg, creator of the ideas, who was threatened with silence. That he responded to this encounter with the forces of repression not with pain, but with the kind of joy that defined him as an artist, helps explain why his Howl still reverberates 55 years later.

© 2011, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.

Writers and Directors: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman | Based on the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg | Animation Designer: Eric Drooker | Cinematography: Edward Lachman | Music: Carter Burwell | Production Design: Thérèse DePrez | Costume Design: Kurt and Bart | Editing: Jake Pushinsky | Producers: Elizabeth Redleaf, Christine Kunewa Walker, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman | Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories | Running time: 85 minutes | Not rated

Cast: James Franco (Allen Ginsberg), Jon Hamm (Jake Ehrlich), David Strathairn (Ralph McIntosh), Bob Balaban (Judge Clayton Horn), Jeff Daniels (Professor David Kirk), Treat Williams (Professor Mark Schorer), Alessandro Nivola (Luther Nichols), Mary-Louise Parker (Gail Potter), Todd Rotondi (Jack Kerouac), Jon Prescott (Neal Cassady), Aaron Tveit (Peter Orlovsky), and Andrew Rogers (Lawrence Ferlinghetti).