Not everyone can pull off the fussy hairstyles and giant glasses of the mid-1950s, but then again, not everyone is James Franco. In the first image of him in costume as Allen Ginsberg in Howl, posted by Entertainment Weekly, Franco wears the contented, self-satisfied smirk of a man who looks good and knows it. Of course, given that he's in character and shares the frame with Aaron Tveit, who plays Ginsberg's long-time partner Peter Orlovsky, it might just be the self-satisfied smirk of a man in love.

Awards Daily also posted the original photo of Orlovsky and Ginsberg upon which the Howl image is based. Yes, it's true, Ginsberg himself wasn't quite the looker that Franco is-- but isn't that point of a biopic, making everyone more attractive than they were in real life? Howl, which also counts Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels and David Strathairn among its cast, doesn't yet have a distributor. The story is set in 1956, when Ginsberg faced obscenity charges after his poem Howl was published.