Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen have joined the already-impressive cast of Walter Salles’ “On the Road”.

Based on the book by Jack Kerouac, the flick has already attained the services of Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Garrett Hedlund (“Tron Legacy”) and Sam Riley (“Control”).

Bookrags offers up the following synopsis of the book (thank god, because I can’t be fagged typing up a summation) :

Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel was a mostly autobiographical travelogue of cross-country trips that Kerouac took during the late 1940s. On the Road’s characters were thinly-disguised Beat luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Kerouac himself who—as narrator Sal Paradise—reflected the American fascination with road travel. The road’s attraction is expressed throughout America’s literature, popular culture, and twentieth-century life. On the Road fostered an alternative view of American life, preceding the counterculture of the 1960s; this unintended effect on Kerouac’s part was partially responsible for his reclusiveness during his later years.

The book covers four road trips, mainly between New York and San Francisco, with several stops in Denver, and detours into Chicago, New Orleans, Virginia, and Mexico. The catalyst for the book was Neal Cassady, a mutual friend of Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s, whose character was named Dean Moriarty. A fast-talking, charismatic womanizer from Denver, Cassady had a love of joyriding in stolen cars, which put him through Denver’s reform schools. In On the Road, Sal idolizes Dean (as Kerouac idolized Cassady) as a swaggering, cowboy-like man of action: “(Dean’s criminality) was a wildyea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains.”

Deadline says Amy is playing “Jane, the emotionally damaged junkie mother of two children and the wife of Old Bull Lee,” and Mortensen is Bull Lee.

Not convinced a film adaptation of “On the Road” will work – those that have read the book know exactly what I mean – but with both Salles and his “Motorcycle Diaries” scripter Jose Rivera behind the film, it’ll at least be worth a look.