![]() Beyond recounting incidents in Cassady's youth, the movie, whose soundtrack is drenched in be-bop, aspires to be an impressionistic canvas of America when the country, still dewy-eyed with postwar optimism, was jumping out of its collective skin.Īlmost every shot is drenched in rich period detail so acute it has a surreal edge. ![]() Kay has made that rhythm the visual pulse of his debut feature film. The fragments of the letter heard over the soundtrack suggest a fevered, semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness running on a jazzy, hopped-up rhythm that became a hallmark of Beat literature. The movie, which opens today at Cinema Village, is based on a letter that the young Cassady wrote to Kerouac when Cassady was living in Denver and working the night shift at a Goodyear Tire factory. That's the portrait of the 20-year-old Neal Cassady (flashily played by the newcomer Thomas Jane) that emerges in Stephen Kay's snazzy-looking but slight film, ''The Last Time I Committed Suicide.'' At 20, the man who became a guiding light of the Beat Generation, inspiring Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' and later joining Ken Kesey's psychedelic troupe the Merry Pranksters, is portrayed as a hunky mixed-up kid with too many hormones roiling around in his body. All you had to do was chain-smoke, play pool, listen to be-bop and break girls' hearts. ![]() You didn't have to dye your hair green, pierce your tongue and wear bizarre eye makeup to stand out as a flaming rebel in the late 1940's. ![]()
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