Icons of Cool: The Heartthrobs, James Franco & James Dean

James Dean and James Franco share a common given name, and Prince James played King James in a biopic that won Franco a Golden Globe in 2002. The two are now linked forever, but fate dove in before the agents ever placed a call. It was a casting choice far bigger than the triumph of comparable facial features and skin tone: Franco was the right person to star in that portrait because, like Dean, he is too complex, too aggressively artistic to be contained by an 8x10 glossy.

White T-shirts and Levi’s can only tell one part of the story. Like Dean, Franco attended UCLA. Like Franco, Dean had a burning intellectual curiosity. The fluid physicality of their screen work matches supple mental spines. That Franco is not content to stroll languidly from role to role, but is instead also pursuing a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in poetry, indicates a highly Dean-ian quest for more—more understanding, more craft, more modes by which to speak the truth, more ways to do something. It is fitting then, that Franco is soon to star as another beacon of individualism from the 1950s, beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Howl, a film that traces the chaotic history of one of the greatest American poets, is exactly the sort of movie James Dean would make if he were alive today. Sometimes it takes a long reach to pass the baton.