Kristen Stewart goes ON THE ROAD!

Kristen Stewart is said to be €˜very much attached€™ to the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac€™s 1957 seminal semi-autobiographical €˜On The Road€™. She is down to play Marylou, another troubled drifter who is married to the volatile and unpredictable Dean Moriarty who takes Sal Paradise (Kerouac€™s alter ego) on several long and eventful road trips across America. These stories would help fuel the beat generation and become a benchmark in American literature. It's somewhat familiar ground for Stewart whose similar role in Sean Penn€™s €˜Into The Wild€™, as Tracy Tatro the travelling guitar strumming girl who falls in love the wandering Alexander Supertramp, certainly belongs to the same ideology. Walter Salles ('The Motorcycle Diaries') will direct after several attempts to make the film have fallen through over the years, including versions by Gus Van Sant and Francis Ford Coppola. It is maybe ironic that a book that took three weeks to write back in 1951 has taken over half a century to be adapted into film form. However the criss-crossing nature of the story and the complex, often hard to define characters have apparently (and understandably) been difficult to translate into film form. There is also the problem of the detailed world that Kerouac describes of late 40's New York, San Francisco, the open highways and now nostalgic cars that are mostly disappeared from contemporary America. Also given that this a film that is beloved my many and has come to represent a significant time and place in American history, this is doubtless a film that anyone wants to be responsible for messing up. But maybe now with a director who is more than capable of making a good looking road movie with political and social connotations and a young talented young cast including Stewart, Garret Hedlund and rumoured Sam Riley, €˜On The Road€™ might finally be going places.

€˜rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.€™