The Beat movement tends to have a nefarious effect on young writers and filmmakers, because it often discourages the qualities they most need to develop: craft, self-consciousness, narrative economy. A too-dull-for-fiction account of the unconventional relationships connecting William S. Burroughs, his doomed wife, and his friends Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, Beat embodies many of the worst qualities of Beat worshippers. It's whiny, pretentious, self-absorbed, and fawning, and it seems to have been edited by a blind, deaf child with garden shears. The film plays like a series of outtakes and deleted scenes, and seems to be missing at least one full reel. At 80 minutes, it's mercifully brief, but it seems to open somewhere deep in what should be its midsection. Beat stars Kiefer Sutherland as Burroughs, who packs his bags and heads out for a grim holiday with his cold, demanding, petty pretty-boy lover, leaving his wife (Courtney Love) behind. But she isn't alone for long, as she's soon visited by Carr (Norman Reedus) and Ginsberg (Ron Livingston), fellow Beats who encourage her to leave Sutherland and start a new life. Haunting the proceedings is the death of Kyle Secor, whom Reedus murdered in response to Secor's increasingly aggressive sexual advances. A game but miscast Sutherland attempts to re-create Burroughs' unmistakable mixture of kinky playfulness and Old Testament dread, but he instead comes across as a gay cross between W.C. Fields and Howard Cosell. Sutherland's broad caricature works against the film's attempt to glean pathos out of his unrequited feelings for his lover, but he turns in an Oscar-worthy tour de force compared to Love, who plunges headfirst into self-parody and never looks back. She wrestles torturously with writer-director Gary Walkow's dialogue, which alternately suggests a grim acting-class exercise, community theater, and the overwrought ramblings of a deluded Jack Kerouac disciple. Sutherland's suggestion that he and Love should perform their patented "William Tell routine" can't come soon enough.