I’m glad now that I didn’t go to Cannes this year and thus, did not see Walter Salles’ On the Road until its re-cut state here at Toronto. I’d heard some negative buzz about the film out of Cannes, and had almost taken if off my TIFF list as my dance card started getting full. But then I heard that Salles had not only taken some 20 minutes out of the Cannes cut, but also restructured it in the process, and since I happen to also be a fan of Salles generally, I decided to make room for it. And I was glad I did, because whatever may have been wrong with the Cannes cut, the version of On the Road playing at TIFF features very solid performances by a stellar cast and moves along at a brisk, frenetic pace that evokes the dual sense of restlessness and purposefulness that drive Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel.

The underlying themes of On the Road remain largely intact here. The interesting trick of adapting a story in which one of the main characters, Sal (Sam Riley) serves primarily as the observer and narrator for all that happens, is how to remain true to Sal’s point of view while also keeping Sal engaging as a character in and of himself. Dean (Kerouac’s stand-in for Neal Cassady) is the real protagonist here, the one who, by all conventions of traditional screenwriting, should be the one from whom all else flows: his needs, the obstacles to his needs, him overcoming those obstacles, him learning “important life lessons,” and so on.

But the unconventional beauty of Kerouac’s novel is how blissfully it defies literary convention, here rambling on languidly for breathless, lengthy paragraphs, there punctuated by staccato bursts of dialog; the structure of the book is in and of itself a meta-statement on defying convention and the burning desire to create something fresh and new. We see everything through Sal’s eyes and thus, what we learn of him is revealed primarily through his detailed, chatty, sometimes rambling observations of and reactions to the people and events around him.

In a film, of course, you can’t really get away with having one of your main characters just be sitting there and observing for two hours, you have to convey the experiences Kerouac relates as his own stand-in, Sal, in a way that shifts Sal into something more of a protagonist as well, and both script and direction pull that off quite nicely. Dean, as the primary “hero,” is an archetype of a young American man with a hedonistic disregard for consequences. He desires to be the intellectual he might have been with a different sort of upbringing, and he’s capable of slinging around bullshit and shifting his moral values on the fly with a casual shrug and wry grin. As much as he’s a character, Dean is also an abstraction of an idea, a time and a place filtered through Sal/Kerouac’s memory; memory in turn serves as a prism refracting not necessarily Dean/Neal in any purely objective sense, but as some amalgamation of who he might actually have been, and who Kerouac wanted him to be, or at least thought he was at the time.

The film has to make Dean more of a concrete character, a likable, relatable protagonist in spite of his inherent and very evident flaws, and that it succeeds is due in large part to solid direction of the cast and a terrific performance by Garrett Hedlund, whose star power should be rising quickly. Almost — almost — I could empathize with Marylou (Kristen Stewart) and Camille (Kirsten Dunst), the women Dean blithely uses and sets aside, uses and sets aside, while they keep coming back for more, as if there’s some affirmation in having Dean’s attention, however fleeting it may be. And Hedlund pulls off that magnetism and charisma here; his intensity in this film somewhat reminds me of early James Franco — all quicksilver intensity and burning intelligence.

Sam Riley takes on the challenge of portraying the more passive and observational narrator Sal as a more active character with his own needs and obstacles to overcome; one of those obstacles, of course, is his infatuation for Dean and all he represents and how that collides with his own values, and the values of the time in which he lives. Here, Sal and Dean somewhat remind me of Norman and Paul, the brothers in A River Runs Through It: One quiet and observant and desperate to hold onto that which he cannot; the other a bright flame that both fascinates and hurts, before it burns out completely, or burns you. In other words, Sal and Dean are realized characters here, but they’re maybe the fleshed-out characters you imagined in your head when you read On the Road, or maybe not quite. For me, they generally work very well.

The female characters get less development, and sometimes feel as if they’re just being dragged along for the ride, with the primary function of servicing the boys or getting pissed at them, by turns; the perspective to keep on that, though, is that this is an adaptation of Kerouac’s book, which is itself a reflection of the values of the time in which it’s set, when men were manly men who drank and got laid and that was okay, but women were either Madonnas or whores. Camille and Marylou represent the two primary paths women could take back then, with Camille bravely and tearfully standing by her recalcitrant man, and Marylou a bit of a conundrum, being simultaneously a sort of pre-feminist era feminist who drank and did drugs and smoked and fucked and went on road trips with guys, and a clingy woman who desperately wanted Dean to own her. Dunst and Stewart both own their roles well, but Stewart’s part gives her more meat to chew on, and her performance is complex and honest, tragic and bold.

All of which brings me to another thing I’ve heard folks around TIFF asking: do you need to have read the book to appreciate the movie? I’ve talked to a few people who hadn’t read the book who found the movie confusing, and in their defense it does introduce a great many characters and situations at a somewhat crazy, bennies-fueled pace, but I don’t think it’s impossible to keep up with or understand. In certain ways, you might even say — or at least I would say — that Salles has made the story and characters of On the Road more accessible, while preserving the tone and universality of Kerouac’s story.

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