“The Greatest Gift We Have is Community, Which is Such an Integral Part of the Human Experience”: Ebs Burnough on Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation

Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is a smartly unconventional look at the 1957 novel that captured a counterculture and continues to resonate with outsiders and inner journey seekers to this very day. Directed by Ebs Burnough (The Capote Tapes), the peripatetic doc includes “never-before-seen material” from the personal archive of Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian immigrants in the small town of Lowell, MA) along with images that provide much-needed context to the sexy author’s postwar milieu. But rather than centering the mythologized man or his alter ego Sal Paradise, Burnough instead takes the inspired decision to focus on the much bigger picture of legacy. And beyond interviewing the requisite academics and surviving friends (David Amram) and lovers (Joyce Johnson), Burnough gives equal weight to today’s no name “on-the-roaders” that we tag along with, and a diverse slew of big name Kerouac fans that sit for the director’s lens. That includes everyone from Josh Brolin and Matt Dillon, to W. Kamau Bell and Natalie Merchant, to Jay McInerney and Kim Jones – the designer who paid tribute to On the Road with his Fall 2022 collection for Dior. (Kerouac admirer Michael Imperioli also makes an offscreen appearance as the ear-catching voice of Jack.) Interestingly, Burnough, a Black gay man who grew up in the South, has an outsider’s perspective on this quintessential outsider’s life that allows him to prompt some truly revelatory insights. In one wonderfully telling scene Johnson recalls how Kerouac encouraged not only her writing but also for her to get out and take a solo road trip of her own — an insanely clueless suggestion considering the risks to a single woman on the road. Not only might she die at the hands of a predator, she could lose her life if she needed an abortion. When Burnough asks what the consequences were for men at the time, Johnson seems startled before firmly declaring, “None.” (Stand-up comic and On the Road fan W. Kamau Bell, a Black man raised in the South but also in Massachusetts, finds the book fascinating almost as an anthropological study, pointing out that it’s an exclusive journey made possible by white male privilege.) Just prior to the doc’s August 1st theatrical premiere, Filmmaker reached out to the multi-hyphenate director, currently the CEO of Hatch House Media, a visiting scholar at Oxford, and a former Senior Advisor to Michelle Obama who served as the Deputy White House Social Secretary.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.