Heart Beat

A minor (low budget) gem, with Nolte ambling ruefully through twenty years of the American Dream as Neal Cassady, the superman-hero-hobo-lover of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Based on the autobiography of Carolyn Cassady (who is played with calm brilliance by Spacek), the movie centres on her triangular life with two men, warily sidestepping the hype and narcissism of Beat mythology and the parallel temptation to indulge in an essay on Literary Genius. Instead, out of an episodic narrative emerges a quiet contemplation of the vast spaces and suburban dreams of the postwar period, a glowingly designed, occasionally tacky epic of America from the Bomb to the Pill.