Best Keanu: “You are meant to roam the plains, live off the fat of the land.”

When I read On the Road, oh-so-many-years ago, I thought it was lousy. These people are 25-years-old, I thought. They are 25-years-old, and they are wandering around the country eating pie. You could have a law degree by the time you’re 25, I remember thinking. And they are wandering around. Eating pie.

So I’ve never had much sympathy for the Beat Generation of writers, although age and perspective have allowed me to see the appeal. Of course we all want to wander the country eating pie, experimenting in one form or another, diving into sensory experience, seeing life in its immediacy and holding up a mirror to its banal details and making them into forms of art.

The Last Time I Committed Suicide made me think twice. Because for the first time, I reconsidered another social factor about the Beats: class.

I had always assumed, and understood, that none of the Beat greats — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs — had ever experienced real suffering. They had access to elite education. They had solid families and homes to go back to once they were done wandering the country and had eaten all the pie. For me, those facts had always tainted the image of the Beats as radicals, living outside society.

If you want to take an analogy from a Keanu Reeves movie — and I’ll admit, I may not be completely historically accurate here — the Beats were like Keanu’s character Scott in My Own Private Idaho, hustling out of choice but could always go home when he wanted. There’s less risk there. It’s less meaningful. It should mean less culturally. Rich kids should not be models of how to dismantle the system or live life authentically.

But then there was Neal Cassady, the central figure in The Last Time I Committed Suicide. In the film, Neal is working nights at a Goodyear tire factory. He has dreams of white picket fences and stability. He is enthralled by his co-worker’s objectively tragic story about losing his wife and writing weekly letters to his young daughter who lives in California. For Cassady, this is life.

So his conflict, as it plays out in the film, holds more meaning. During the long crux of the film’s plot, in what I imagine to be typical Beat-story style, Cassady is trying to get to his friend’s house to pick up a suit so he can impress at a job interview the next day. He’s sidetracked by his barfly friend Harry, played by Keanu Reeves, who drunkenly pushes him into calling up an old girlfriend on his behalf.

Neal is in the midst of one of those life circumstances, where he can choose stability — the job is part-and-parcel of the new life he can have with his old love — or to return to his wandering, wild ways by joining up again with the other woman. If it were any other Beat writer, the tension wouldn’t be nearly as acute (and there’s little tension in any case).

Because those men would just go back to Columbia. This wouldn’t be their last chance at a job or a vanilla relationship where they could simply settle down and ease back into society. For Cassady, however, it’s different. He was born into a bit of a life of chaos, had numerous run-ins with the law, and spent time in prison. The struggle for him is deeper, more authentic, and more compelling than any of his Beat Generation fellows.

Of course, there’s no telling how much of The Last Time I Committed Suicide is actually true. It is said to be based on the Joan Anderson letter of Cassady’s, but the film is properly understood as fiction. That’s pretty much beside the point, as it intends to highlight, I would assume, that style of writing and narrative, and those themes of being wild, of wandering, and of movement. Another quote from the Keanu character, after he and Neal, along with two women, steal a car and head off into the desert for a joyride: “Is that not what we needed? Movement! The only thing that keeps us on this earth.”

The film made me think of Keanu’s apparent admiration for the Beats, having recited one of their poems as part of a Tibet House benefit in March 2022 which caused him some professional ripple effects. I liked Keanu in this. His character’s role is hard to nail down at first, until the central scene where you discover he’s essentially a hanger-on, a drunk in constant need of companionship, no matter the consequences for whomever he’s imposing on. It turns out Harry is much older than Cassady at “32 or 33” — this is Keanu, playing his age for once — and thinks nothing of using his friend to “court” a 16-year-old girl. But he’s an important character against Cassady; you see how he’s trapped not only by his job and his lack of access to avenues to a better life, but also by friends who would be happy to have him stay where he is.

Best of all, in this entire film, no one, at any time, eats pie. Although there is a killer scene over a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich.

March 2022