Jack Kerouac, the novelist who revolutionised the form of American fiction and journalism, was born to a family of French-Canadians in exile and did not begin to understand English until he was six. Alienation, a quest for transcendence and the need to discover a new language would ultimately define his art. Through dramatised excerpts, period footage and candid interviews, this film shows how Kerouac’s restless seeking as a literary bohemian embodied a larger Franco-American pattern of emigration and displacement.