I NEED TICKETS TO HOWL! So pled the sign at the shuttle bus stop outside Park City’s Eccles Theater on Thurdsay night. Inside, past the phalanx of photographers, past the mobs of bundled-up gawkers ...

The sometimes exuberant James Franco makes for an oddly muted Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” an all-star cast bio-pic about Ginsberg’s most famous poem and the 1957 obscenity trial it provoked.

It's San Francisco in 1957, and an American masterpiece is put on trial. Howl, the film, recounts this dark moment using three interwoven threads: the tumultuous life events that led a young Allen ...