The film: The Broken Tower (2011), available on DVD via Focus World
Why it's an Inessential Essential: Straight out of New York University's Tisch School for the Arts, actor-turned-aspiring filmmaker James Franco helmed, starred in and adapted The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, Paul Mariani's biography of the titular turn-of-the-century poet. Franco's moving film — his first feature as a director to be commercially released — depicts Crane (played by Franco, of course) as a frustrated artist striving for an avant-garde artistic ideal that he would never fully realize.
Crane, an alcoholic bisexual (one of whose conquests is played by Michael Shannon!) committed suicide at the age of 32 before he was able to complete The Bridge, his epic post-modern poem about, well, everything. Franco's version of Crane identifies his style as a response to T.S. Eliot's poems. He tells a friend that his poems are similarly reliant on free association, though Crane's poems are considerably more hopeful than Eliot's are.
While Franco's public persona suggests that he has become unfocused and uninterested in his own celebrity, The Broken Tower proves that, along with the probably never-to-be-released-on-DVD My Own Private River (a companion film to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho that Franco and Van Sant exhaustively assembled from unused Idaho footage), Franco has made good use of his time and talent. For example, it's apparent that Franco heavily researched Crane's world, though his film exhibits that knowledge in a rather modest way; The Broken Tower's narrative is, after all, mostly composed of dialogue-light long takes where Crane struggles to become inspired while having sex, getting drunk and taking long walks. But the period Crane lived in and the way it directly influenced…
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