James Franco wrote, directed, produced and starred in a black-and-white film about poet Hart Crane.
It was recently released.
From a story in the Los Angeles Times...
Crane’s verse, which was largely influenced by Romantics such as Whitman and Poe, was heavy on metaphors, blank verses and homosexual innuendo. Both the greatest criticism and praise of his poetry concerns the “logic” of Crane’s metaphors; his poetry is so loaded with them that many readers (including Franco) could only appreciate and understand Crane’s poetry in bites.
“His poetry is difficult for me too,” Franco admitted during a discussion after the premier with Francisco Ricardo, a critic of new media and contemporary art and literature at the Rhode Island School of Design. “I couldn’t even tell you what half his stuff means. But what inspired me is his spirit and drive. He cared so much about his work, even when nobody else understood it.”
“You just stated your own repertoire,” Ricardo teased Franco.
Indeed, Franco’s decision to feature Crane isn’t so surprising if you’re familiar with Franco’s academic interests in literature (he studied English and creative writing at UCLA, graduated from Columbia’s MFA writing program, has taken classes at Brooklyn College and Warren Wilson College and is pursuing a doctorate at Yale) and his more cerebral film work.
This is the third time Franco has played a gay character (after his roles in “Milk” and “Howl”), which seems likely to add to the frequent speculation about his sexual identity.
The 99-minute film captures Crane’s life in an unsettling stream of scenes of explicit sex, drunken rages, depressive lows and literary genius.
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