Friday's movie: Jack Kerouac's "On the Road", starring Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley, Kirsten Dunst

Jack Kerouac's seminal pseudo-autobiography finally heads to the big screen thanks to director Walter Salles Jr. (The Motorcycle Diaries) and producer Francis Ford Coppola. The tale is semi-based on the author's trips across America, with fiction intertwining with reportedly real events and people met along the way.

We begin in New York in 1947, where Kerouac’s alter ego, budding young writer Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), meets a larger-than-life figure named Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) through a mutual friend. Dean is the sort of carefree, unreliable, peculiarly charismatic bohemian who attracts crowds of friends wherever he goes, and about whom legends are told. Sexually speaking, Dean is straight but adventurous, and his new wife Marylou (Kristen Stewart) is what you might politely call a libertine. Over the next few years, Dean, Marylou, Sal, and assorted other friends – including gay Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) and tied-down Ed Dunkel (Danny Morgan) – embark on a series of unplanned travels back and forth across America. Marijuana, sex, and petty theft are major components of the journeys. Everything orbits around planet Dean.

Garrett Hedlund, last seen as the big lump of dullness at the center of “TRON Legacy,” is considerably more magnetic as Dean Moriarty, a selfish character who is so much fun to be around that his friends forget how selfish he is. Kerouac’s avatar, Sal, is an observer in his own story. He takes a back seat not only to Dean but to Marylou, portrayed here with shocking sexual freedom by Kristen Stewart. The film also benefits from a host of vivid characters: Kirsten Dunst as Dean’s second wife; Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams as a pair of Louisiana drug addicts; Steve Buscemi as a homosexual who propositions Dean; Terrence Howard as a jazz-loving New York friend; Elisabeth Moss as Ed Dunkel’s fed-up wife.

For coffee hour and movie locations, detailed directions to get there, and to RSVP, go here:

http://www.meetup.com/Bangkok-Coffee-and-Movie/events/80764102/

See you there!