Tonight's film dramatises the story behind the leading artists who personified the Beat Generation, which saw its roots in the meeting of Allen Ginsberg , Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in the forties. Examining their bohemian life in the fifties through a set of vignettes, featuring Dennis Hopper as Burroughs, Johnny Depp as Kerouac and John Turturro as Ginsberg, it also charts the subsequent San Francisco and West Coast renaissance, the hippie, political and spiritual movements of the sixties and seventies, and their influence in today's popular culture.