When Jack Kerouac published On the Road in 1957, he presented the novel as the product of a single marathon writing binge. It was a method he had been working on since the late 1940s that his friend Allen Ginsberg dubbed “spontaneous bop prosody”. Despite the manuscript actually being a synthesis of years of ten years of notes and fragments (as this film shows), the press went mad for the myth of spontaneous prose. What could be more exciting at the height of the cold war than presenting the US as the place of ultimate freedom and possibility, something apparently unavailable to non-western or socialist nations? On the Road seemed to be an organic, undiluted product of America. It poured out raw and thick from the mind of a man whose voice was marketed as a synthesis of the repressed forces that lay buried beneath the veneer of American postwar prosperity. The US “culture industry” burned heavy diesel in the promotion of Kerouac.There were naysayers. Other writers like Truman Capote loathed the book. Of the Beat generation in general he once quipped: “None of them can write, not even Mr Kerouac … [it] isn’t writing at all – it’s typing”. There were also many conservative critics that denounced the work’s sexual morality. But here was the cleverness of the “culture industry”. These critics could be rendered as an older cultural elite unable to grasp the significance of the novel. Or even as dried-up husks of an obsolescent religious right. This was the late fifties; a new world was coming. Better get off the freeway if you can’t stand the speed. The trailer for Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of A Nation. However much his fans might cling to this vision of the novel, Kerouac does not have the reputation now he did in the 1960s and 1970s. Waves of feminist criticism, ecological theory and a more cautious stance in literary culture toward the American political project have left him something of a fossil.It is intriguing, therefore, to see the director of Kerouac’s Road, Ebs Burnough (former deputy social secretary to the Obama White House), return to this mythologisation of the American open road. Does something of Kerouac’s Americana still exist, the film asks, in the era of Black Lives Matter (BLM), of militarised police, at a time when those conservatives who were once so easy to denounce have taken control of the public discourse?Burnough’s film attempts to synthesise two competing narratives that do not quite hold together. First, it’s a strong (if not wholly original) account of the reception of Kerouac’s novel and the author himself. It uses interviews with celebrity fans, the American writer Joyce Johnson (a former girlfriend of Kerouac’s who has superb things to say about life for the “Beat” women) and Kerouac’s biographer Ann Charters. Second, the director interweaves three micro-narratives of contemporary American road trips that have some rather loose relationship to the ideas of freedom Kerouac is held to represent. One follows a young Black man from Philadelphia who is in the process of leaving the poverty of his home city for the promises of Morehouse University (the reverse narrative of Kerouac who dropped out of Columbia). Another is a couple who are living on the road to re-energise their marriage. Another shows a woman’s reunion with her abusive father.The principal issue is that the film cannot reconcile its nostalgia for Kerouac’s era with the true historical and political conditions of the contemporary US. For one, Kerouac’s novel is anything but an account of American plurality. On the Road has a relentlessly over-determined first-person voice that is notable for its blind spots far more than the truly expansive panoramic vision of American life Burnough takes to it be. To its credit, the film does address the fact that really, at core, On the Road is about one man’s (the narrator Sal Paradise) obsession with another (Dean Moriarty). Yet there is nothing much here about the irony that the very obsession with unfiltered first-person speech, which Kerouac’s novel made so fashionable in American literature, has since toxified. It is now associated with masculine “free speech” and the suppression of alternatives that define contemporary political discourse.Today, Sal Paradise would have a podcast. And I am not convinced, swathed in deep misogyny and violence as the novel is, that it would be much different from some of the worst of the manosphere. On The Road is an exercise in resource extraction (of people, especially women, fuel and landscape, seen as salve to the troubled male soul). This is what makes it interesting as a cultural account of the 1950s. In the film, only the singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant (who is predictably brilliant, insightful and wise) and the comic and cultural critic W. Kamau Bell come close to seeing this.The Trayvon generationAt 25 minutes in the director overdubs Joyce Johnson speaking about the Beat generation as the voice of the underclass of the 1950s on to an image of Amin (the Morehouse student) wearing a BLM hoodie. It is hard to know if the director is being ironic, or if what the poet Elizabeth Alexander has called “the Trayvon generation” (after Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African-American boy who was fatally shot by his neighbour in 2012) is meant to be seen as a Beat generation in utero. The chasm economically and socially between the conditions of the later 1940s-50s and the present day make this parallel seem highly dubious. Most Black men in the contemporary US would not risk crossing the country at 70mph while drinking and driving a Chevy, as Sal Paradise does in On the Road. The film does address the pervasive culture of violence in contemporary America at moments. One of most poignant interviews is with Amin’s mother who is worried about her son being shot. Yet, the film does not suggest this could be the responsibility of the police. The fault, it seems to imply, lies within the community. This is an egregious misrepresentation of the purpose of BLM, and seems at best politically muted from the director.The film is very unwilling to undertake the critique needed to measure the distance between the Beats and Trump’s America. Indeed, it actually reproduces many of the flaws of Kerouac himself in being so optimistic about the US. The problems of the world today are not solved by a road-trip anymore than they were in 1957. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.Michael Collins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.