Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels and Mary-Louise Parker have signed on to the biopic Howl, with James Franco playing beatnik icon Allen Ginsberg.

Others joining the cast include Paul Rudd and David Strathairn, according to the Hollywood Reporter trade paper.

Documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, of Telling Pictures, will be writing, producing and directing the 1950s-era account of the obscenity trial over Ginsberg's groundbreaking poem.James Franco, shown at at a film premiere in New York City in August, will star as Beatnik writer Allen Ginsberg in Howl. (Stuart Ramson/Associated Press)

"Fifty years later, Ginsberg's vision is as relevant as the year he wrote it," Friedman said in a statement released on Tuesday.

"It resonates with issues of free speech, government censorship, militaristic empire-building, fear-mongering, sexual conformity and the co-opting of religion."

The filmmakers were approached by the Allen Ginsberg Trust to create the film, which will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the book-length poem.

Real-life characters in the movie include attorney Ralph McIntosh (Strathairn), Judge Clayton Horn (Alda), prosecution witness Prof. David Kirk (Daniels), and radio personality and prosecution witness Gail Potter (Parker).

Veteran director Gus Van Sant, who helmed Good Will Hunting, will be the executive producer. There's no release date yet.

Ginsberg, who died in 1997, belonged to the beat generation of writers. Along with friends such as Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, he eschewed the trappings of the status quo and promoted a life of spontaneity, sexual liberation and experimentation with drugs.

Howl, published in 1956, relates the stories and experiences of Ginsberg's group of friends and contemporaries in a hallucinatory style.

It lays bare their sexuality and homosexuality, which led to the trial in 1957. In the end, the judge decided against the obscenity charge and regarded the poem to be of "redeeming social importance."