'The Mad Ones'

THE BODY at the edge of the railroad tracks refused to stir as the desert wind dragged the sand toward the rusty cliffs. The stiff blond hair stuck in jagged clumps to the forehead, and the two blue eyes glared, dead mirrors at the cloudless sky. They found Neal Cassady like a bloated Buick at the side of the road, when a tailpipe or a radiator couldn't fix him anymore, when a girl or a joint couldn't set him smiling, when his ex-friend Jack or his ex-wife Carolyn couldn't get him to talk.

He died the way false prophets are supposed to die, washed ashore on the sands of a stillborn ocean, forgotten except in the frenetic words of the man who made him Dean Moriarty, the hero of On the Road. And now they're trying to bring Neal back to life, bring Jack back to life, make Carolyn rich and famous. Don't they know that what's dead is dead, that Neal and Jack are dead, that the fifties are rotting away under Time's tombstone, that the sixties are dead, that Christ! even the seventies are dead!

What do they expect, all of us to pick up and take off, hit the road again as if there were no gas crisis or recession or cold war? Or are we supposed to watch Neal and Jack--and their lover, Carolyn--with that gooey, suicidal depression that tells us we missed it, the glory days of the fifties: Ike on the tee, Steve Allen on the TV, and a nation of ostriches dressing up in goatees, dark glasses and filthy poetry.

Hollywood is stuck making films without purpose, films that suck on the scars of the wounds we suffered in the sixties, films that have to discover every Lost Generation that wanted to stay Lost. Heart Beat tries to take us back to Haight Street and Greenwich Village, to throw color on the black and white legend of Jack Kerouac, to show us in elegiac tones where we came from and to tell us in loud whispers where we can still go. It's time, Hollywood says, for us to see the truth about Kerouac and the Cassadys.

As Neal, Nick Nolte cuts, dives and spins with a clowning sensual appeal that overwhelms John Heard as Jack and Sissy Spacek as Carolyn. He twists his shoulders, rolls his eyes and straightens his collar with a sheepish grin that looks alluringly out of place on a man his size. He can never do anything wrong because he's just having fun. He's the kind of guy who never needs a reason--just gas.

Looking like a skinny William Shatner, Heard's Jack appears as unlikely to start the Beat Generation as the real Kerouac must have. Torn between the genteel sobriety of California suburbia and literary fame as a New York author, Kerouac compromised and died an alcoholic wimp in Florida. We last see him warming in the sun, a camp blanket tossed across his kness as if he were a suburban Ezra Pound who had anticipated his usefulness or outlived his youthfulness and was only good for gardening, pushing down daisies.

Spacek, that marvelously lithe, tiny creature from the innards of Texas, manages to portray Carolyn Cassady with a gleaming, wry smile and a gentle Southern voice that can say things like "Something had ended--they used to call it innocence," and almost get away with it.

BUT NOBODY gets away with anything in Heart Beat. Writer/director John Byrum tries to give us both the lives of these reluctant heroes and a portrait of the sorry society they couldn't join. His inability to fully develop either results in the loss of potentially superb performances. His cinematic style is shoddy and unimaginitive and his script, while never terrible, chugs its way to an ending with deplorable mediocrity.

Mediocrity seems to be the villain of this piece, especially to young, Jewish, New York avant-garde poet Ira Streiker played by Ray Sharkey with all of the obnoxious energy of a real-life poet whose name almost rhymes with Strindberg. In three short sequences, Sharkey opens up with the abrasive, honest creativity that soured critics and the general public to Bohemian art. He sours some of his friends, too, but his attempt to fight mediocrity with boldness stands out in a film that turns the lives of three vibrant, struggling, unusual people into three mud puddles.

Byrum's illustrious screenwriting career includes such triumphs as Harry and Walter Go to New York, Mahogany, and Inserts. It seems a shame that someone of his caliber was entrusted with the memory and the legend of Kerouac and the Cassadys. It's even more of a shame that Hollywood couldn't let the legend live in restless peace but had to kill it and paste it on silver billboards on the road across America.