Get Home Free

The chief chronicler of the Beat Generation portrays the hangover that followed the giddy early days of the movementin this poignant follow-up to Go Dan Verger and May Delano share a loft in New York City, but the passion that brought them together has turned brittle and sour, much like the boozy parties and late-night discussions that so thrilled them a few years ago. The brightest lights of their circle have moved on—visionary poet David Stofksy to a job in advertising, novelist Gene Pasternak to Mexico—and Dan and May eventually decide to do the same, abandoning each other to return to their respective hometowns. On the Connecticut seashore, Dan contemplates the trip to Europe that he has always promised himself, but finds his dissipated habits hard to break. Killing time with Old Man Molineaux, the charismatic town drunk, Dan recognizes what his life might look like in 30 years. Meanwhile, May returns to Louisiana and is surprised to discover Paul Hobbes, a New York friend, playing piano in a bar on the African American side of town. At a wild, drug-fueled party in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, May comes face-to-face with the complicated racial dynamics of the Beat movement. Artful and authentic, melancholy yet tender, Get Home Free pays tribute to a generation that, in daring to break with the patterns of the past, profoundly influenced the future of American culture.