Jack Kerouac found his literary style in Thomas Wolfe and Walt Whitman and the beat of his free-flowing prose in jazz. An increasingly mystical figure, he searched for answers by bumming across the continent, traveling in Mexico and settling in San Francisco during the heyday of its literary renaissance, experimenting with drugs and Zen Buddhism. Kerouac's life is examined through rare documentary footage, including television appearances with Steve Allen and William Buckley, interviews with his contemporaries, and dramatized scenes from his life and works. Beginning with his impoverished Catholic boyhood, through his development as one of the most important modern American authors, to his self-destructive demise at the age of 49, Kerouac is both an accurately detailed documentary and a moving drama. (73 minutes)