The film follows Kerouac's biography, and scenes from his life are acted out, sometimes with voice-overs from his novels. I like the young actor who plays Kerouac. For some reasons Kerouac is portrayed as either doofy-looking or brown-haired in films like 'Naked Lunch' and 'Heart Beat' and I was glad that this filmmaker got the image right: the actor is handsome and sort of sad-looking, and has black hair. My favorite image here is probably that of the young writer returning to Lowell on a big armchair mounted on the back of a pickup truck.
There's about a minute of a bloated and drunk Kerouac on William F. Buckley's TV show. Buckley asks Kerouac an inflammatory question (whether he inspired the hippies) and gets the kind of response he wanted: Kerouac insults Lawrence Ferlinghetti, huffs and puffs, and declares himself a Catholic.
The only problem is, there's not enough actual footage. The two TV clips I described are about all there is, and I want to see more. There are also interviews with Kerouac's first wife Edie Parker, Herbert Huncke, Robert Creeley, a priest who knew Kerouac as a child, and others.