The film cannot control its lust for the tang of actuality, forgetting what it takes to dream a prose narrative into being. Yes, Kerouac’s novel was very close to his life, but On the Road is really its prose. One might say the prose is the main character. How quickly it was written and under what conditions, who knows, any more than one can say what was really behind the tone of Charlie Parker when the sound came flowing out of his horn?
The film never finds a way to embody the sound….
— Andrew O’Hagen, “Jack Kerouac: Crossing the Line” New York Review of Books, 21 March 2013