It’s springtime in New York’s West Village, where a former boutique on Hudson Street has been transformed into a replica of Six Gallery, the former hot spot on Fillmore Street where the Beat movement caught fire in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg unleashed his groundbreaking poem “Howl.”

Waiting quietly to go on camera is James Franco, who portrays the famed poet in Howl, the genre-bending motion picture filmed here over three weeks in March. Due for release early next year, the film will include scripted scenes, verbatim sequences from the obscenity trial that could have landed the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in jail, and an animation sequence by Berkeley’s Eric Drooker, best known for his New Yorker covers.

Upon learning that Franco, a Palo Alto native, had been cast as Ginsberg, the blogosphere hummed with skepticism. After all, the model-handsome Franco was due to play a man most often associated with the rotund, shaggy figure he became later in life. But on the night that “Howl” debuted, Ginsberg was 29 (two years younger than Franco) and far from unattractive.

More than four decades after that fateful night, the rocket-riding actor (and MFA student at Columbia) stands to the side of the stage, lost in thought in a room flooded with faux smoke. Extras are shoehorned into the tiny, brick-walled space and ushered to round tables festooned with straw-topped chianti bottles dripping with candle wax.

Now it’s time to put months of prep work to the test. Franco steps up to the podium and studies a pile of papers. The film’s Oscar-winning director-screenwriters, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, of San Francisco (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; The Times of Harvey Milk), huddle with him briefly. Then—“Action!”

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix…”

Franco’s transformation into the fire-breathing poet is stunning. Lunging into the words with feral intensity, he conjures Ginsberg’s cadence and intonations with eerie accuracy. He reads flawlessly, on and on, as the cameras keep rolling.

As happened on that night in 1955, Jack Kerouac, played by Todd Rotondi, gets increasingly excited as the poem surges along. He hits his knee with his fist, swills jug burgundy, leaps to his feet, and exhorts, “Go, Allen, go!”

Friedman shouts, “Cut! Beautiful, James!” Everyone erupts into applause, and Franco grins broadly. Producer Elizabeth Redleaf, watching on a monitor, breathes out: “This is so, so cool.”

“This has been nothing but a pleasure,” Franco tells me during the break. “In high school, Ginsberg and Kerouac were the first two authors I read when I got seriously interested in literature.” Franco says when he filmed Milk in San Francisco (in an acclaimed performance as Milk’s lover Scott Smith), he often talked about the Beats with director Gus Van Sant, who worked with William S. Burroughs on Drugstore Cowboy in 1989. Van Sant introduced Franco to Epstein and Friedman and their Howl script, and the project was green-lighted.

Says Epstein after the scene wraps, “There was a moment when I realized that James had found the true spirit of Allen, and it brought tears to my eyes.”