Out this week on Blu-ray and DVD is Howl, award-winning documentary directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's provocative, passionate and poetic new film examining Alan Ginsberg's life and creative process. The film, however, mostly centers on the famed court cast for obscenity that paved the way for Jack Kerouac's On The Road and William Burrough's Naked Lunch. Handsome James Franco at first seems an unlikely candidate to portray poet Allen Ginsberg, but period photos of Ginsberg during his Beat Generation years fit Franco to a tee. The actor also nails the cadence of Ginsberg's voice -- particularly while reciting his poem "Howl" in a San Francisco coffee shop during the late 1950s. David Straithairn plays the prosecutor, Jon Hamm the defense lawyer and Bob Balaban the judge in that landmark ruling. The filmmakers also nicely use animation to illustrate the hallucinatory holy fire of Ginsberg's great poem.