AllMovie

This adaptation of Dan Wakefield's book about the literary and social life of Manhattan in the 1950s is a disappointment. Perhaps the subject is too large and diffuse to cover in a film that runs just over an hour. An impressive lineup of writers talk about those heady days in the place where, as Bruce Jay Friedman says, "you got started." Most of the interviewees attest to New York's magical attraction. In the years after World War II, New York became a mecca for ambitious writers from all over the country, providing what one interviewee says was "the alternative society," a place where experimentation with liquor and sex was not only permissible but encouraged. But the film seems skimpy on period footage; Norman Mailer, along with J.D. Salinger, the stars of the decade, is seen in footage mostly drawn from the '60s and later. There are amusing moments, among them Joan Didion offering a rueful description of her ongoing hangovers. Many subjects -- the rise of the writer as celebrity, the rise of women authors, the Beat movement, the popularity of psychoanalysis ("the religion of the time") -- are touched upon, but only superficially. Wakefield's book surely provided greater context and depth to these subjects.