Howl

Howl (2010) is a biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. San Francisco, 1957: a slim collection of verse lands a bookseller in court on obscenity charges, and the poem at the centre of it all belongs to a young Beat poet named Allen Ginsberg.

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman split the film into three tracks running at once — the trial, a candid interview with Ginsberg looking back on how the poem came to exist, and animated sequences that visualise the imagery of the text itself. James Franco plays Ginsberg; David Strathairn and Jon Hamm face off as opposing counsel; Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, and Treat Williams appear on the stand.

What the prosecution called obscene, literary America called a turning point. Watch Howl (2010) online on iFILM.