The originality of Michael J. Prince's monograph begins with its title. Not only have adaptations of the work of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac been neglected in favor of adaptations of the work of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens, but even after the release of films that centralize the authors rather than their works – for example, Shakespeare in Love (1998), Becoming Jane (2007), and The Invisible Woman (2013) – adapting the beat poets means something very different than adapting the work, or dramatizing the life, of Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens. That difference – the relation between film adaptations of a writer's life and a writer's work – is at the heart of Prince's study.

For Prince, the preeminence of “the element of authenticity” (xii) in the beats’ work offers both the most serious challenges and the greatest opportunities to adapters. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all insisted on the primacy of authenticity in their writing; how can filmmakers preserve anything like that authenticity while working in a medium that is at best ambivalent about the written word in general and the confessional outpourings and formal inventiveness of the beats in particular? Prince addresses this question by identifying three modes of authenticity – “historical authenticity” to the circumstances of the beats’ lives and shared milieu, “emotional authenticity” to their “lived experience of feelings,” and an “‘aesthetic’ authenticity” that gives due “metatextual” consideration to “writing about writing,” or “the production of text” (xviii, xix, original emphasis).

Prince uses these three yardsticks to analyse and evaluate ten beat adaptations from Arthur Freed's “beatnik musical” (1) The Subterraneans (1960) to Michael Polish's Big Sur. Walter Salles and José Rivera's On the Road (2012) and Big Sur come off the best for their resistance to Hollywood formulas, platitudes, and mythmaking: Big Sur, in particular, “has the highest degree of textual fidelity, historical reference, and a nonasked directness” (107) of any Kerouac adaptation. Prince also praises Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (2010), “the metatextual beat adaptation par excellence” (90) for its deployment of “five cinematic registers that correspond to distinct aspects of [Ginsberg's 1955] poem” (79). Of the most celebrated beat adaptation, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), he concedes by contrast that “one could be led to view the adaptation more as a surreal biopic with some elements of the novel thrown in” (47).

The pointed questions Prince raises about the relation between adapting authors’ works and adapting their lives – most importantly, “How can the authenticity project of the beat poets be said to have survived in these works?” (115) – constitute his most significant achievement here. Broadening the subject of adaptation, which most scholars use almost exclusively to refer to reworkings of particular texts, to include the lives and experiences of their creators, and examining more closely and critically how those adaptations represent the acts and words of writing, would confirm a shift already under way among recent adaptation scholars, refiguring cinema as a forthrightly metatextual medium and moving life-and-works movies from the periphery of adaptation studies to their very centre.

At the same time, Prince's own analyses exemplify some of the formidable obstacles such a project would face. The contrast he draws between the “confessional narrative and stream-of-consciousness run-on style” that Kerouac used in writing The Subterraneans as “the acme of honest revelation of emotional fact” and MGM's attempt to use its adaptation to “make money” (9) may be accurate, but it is unhelpfully facile. Prince never examines the relation between the problems of adapting poetry and prose, treating them as indistinguishable when it suits him, as in his many references to three “beat poets” who mostly wrote prose, but distinguishing between them when it does not (27, 98, 111). His suggestion that “[f]idelity issues” that might determine whether Naked Lunch was more properly Burroughs's film or Cronenberg's could be “adjudicated with Polonius’ sage advice: ‘To thine own self be true’” (48) conflates fidelity with integrity, and “deep fidelity,” the term he borrows from Dennis Hutchins to measure “the adapter's commitment to transferring something of the original intention of the author and reproducing or transducing the aesthetics of the original source text” (xx), conflates fidelity with authenticity. In short, Prince's questions are consistently more provocative and precise than his answers. If he does no more, however, than prepare the way for further work on the beats, or more on the relation between biopics and adaptations, he will have rendered the field a notable service.