The Beats have returned with a vengeance. Newsreel footage of Eisenhower America and Levittown, shots from Ozzie and Harriet, and scenes from the HUAC hearings show precisely why the Beats were so welcomed by the 1950s as an antidote to noxious postwar conformity.
Workman is generous and sometimes witty in showing how the movement permeated pop culture.
The Source gives some sense of Beat trajectory from a kind of unconscious collaboration among a group of hipsters, to a defined and recognized movement, to a parody of itself as early as the 1960s . Of course, the authentic article is always better than such pastiches, and the film interpolates welcome archival footage and interviews with the major players. Not everyone was as thrilled by the Beats as they were with themselves. Unfortunately The Source is too captivated by its own breakneck style and the standard reading of the Beats as a fabulous all-boys club to dwell on such insights, and soon it's back to those boys. If women were often outside the Beat orbit, gay men were more than welcome.