Howl: a good movie, but is it good for the Jews?

The Jewish Week, like every other newspaper, shouts out to Howl, but lends it a uniquely Semitic spin:

About halfway into “Howl,” the edgy, thoughtful new docudrama by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, you begin to realize that, in his uncanny recreation of Allen Ginsberg’s speech and performance rhythms, James Franco is beginning to edge into an series of incantatory rhythms not unlike that of a chasid in the throes of ecstatic prayer.

The critic follows up with some mixed, yet compelling, metaphors.

It’s a telling moment, keenly observed, that places Ginsberg not only in the chain of tradition of that master of the long line, Walt Whitman, but in the wake of the same waves of chasidism that Whitman himself apparently knew. And when Franco/Ginsberg describes his writing as seeking “a rhythmic articulation of feeling” that begins in the pit of the stomach and travels with the breath to the head and mouth, he is, wittingly or not, describing the same combination of breath and prayer that other Jewish mystics have invoked.

Discussion of "bop kabbalah" follows.