After tackling The Motorcycle Diaries in 2004, director Walter Salles has taken on another road story. This time, it is the groundbreaking Jack Kerouac novel On The Road which has finally made it to the screen after decades of attempted adaptations.

Sam Riley plays Kerouac avatar Sam Paradise, a young writer immersed in the post-war Beat culture of America. Along with his eclectic bunch of friends and acquaintances, their youthful explorations centre on the Bacchanalian Dean Moriarty. Following the disparate bunch over a number of years and locations, bonds are made and broken as everyone eventually moves on and leaves Dean behind.

While there is much to like superficially in On The Road, the film falls short of being in any way engaging or satisfying. It falls into the trap of becoming a mere illustration of the book, leaving us with the sense that the time period of the book has been caught in amber to the detriment of the screen version.

Across the board the acting is of a relatively high standard. Garrett Hedlund has the tall order of acting as the flame to which the other characters are drawn. Previously non-descript in TRON: Legacy, Hedlund has pulled a magnetic performance from what seems like nowhere. As a fulcrum for the youthful adventures of the crowd, as well as a homoerotic buddy for Sal, Hedlund’s drawl is transfixing in its own booze-soaked way.

Kristen Stewart is also able to inject some sexuality into her performance as Marylou, the young woman with whom Sal and Dean are both fascinated. Freed of the abstinent shackles of the Twilight franchise, there is more sexual energy and release in her turn here than in most of her previous adult career. Sam Riley also does a decent job, even if he seems a bit limp in comparison to an excessive amount of famous actors in what must be one of the more dense examples of stunt casting.

Visually, the film works more often than it doesn’t: Eric Gautier’s cinematography is fantastically evocative of the seasons passing before our eyes. There’s a humid quality to the sun-drenched fields in which Sal finds himself, and when he pops his jacket collar in the snow you almost expect the screen to develop a layer of frost. At times when the film lacks narrative momentum, Salles’s camerawork instills a sense of progression through some great tracking shots and carefully framed travel passages.

However, the film often adheres too closely to the text and is poorer for it. Although the charges of misogynism stemming from the disregard for female characters are easy to make, these features are present in the source text. Whereas Kerouac’s prose possesses a hypnotic quality and elegant spontaneity, this doesn’t translate well to the screen. Characters that seemed vibrant instead seem dull and narcissistic. The meanderings and musings of Sal and his cohorts make for a well-realised quest for expression and meaning, but as part of an un-engaging and jarring journey.

Little time is spent on examining the motives of our characters; what it is that they are searching for or the intellectual fire that burns behind all those spliffs is unexplored. It feels as if Salles has done nothing more than to provide a visually well-crafted illustration of the book, and one that fails to be as effective as Salles’s own adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries.

The language of cinema, however, is not the language of the written page. It seems that Salles has taken on something that is ineffective as a literal translation. Much like the characters in the film and their relationship with the magnetic Dean, you’ll initially be drawn in by the visual and aural indulgences, but these will only distract you up to a point. When you take a step back, all that you will see is a hollow and superficial artifice.