Feature | Lights, Camera, Action! – Kill Your Darlings (Movie Review)

Kill Your Darlings (UK Rating: 15)

The film follows the early lives of what became the Beat Generation poets - Allen Ginsburg (Daniel Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster) - and how a murder in 1944 provided the spark that brought them together as a movement.

The meaning of the title is explained early on; it's a quotation from Willliam Faulkner used by Ginsberg's poetry lecturer to explain how he can become a good - and, hopefully, successful - writer and poet. He needs to 'kill off' all the things that he loves because they will hold him back. Ultimately, it is what the young Ginsberg does, but the phrase also comes back to haunt him when the murder occurs. The killing involves the object of his affection, Lucien Carr (the impossibly beautiful and androgynous Dane DeHaan) whose own private life is, to put it mildly, complicated.

The murder provides a powerful climax to the movie and is upsetting in equal measure - but it's also decidedly ambiguous. We are, as we discover, seeing Ginsberg's version, written after the event in the hope of getting Lucien acquitted. He wasn't actually there.

The relationship between Carr and Ginsberg has echoes of Brideshead Revisited: Ginsberg coming from a less affluent background and adoring the privileged yet capricious Carr, who picks up and puts down people like they were toys. However, everybody around him adores him, regardless of how badly he treats them.

This is a riveting, intense and thrilling film. It paints probably the most "Rock 'n' Roll" picture anyone is ever likely to see of the mid-1940s: drugs, drink, sex (gay and straight) and betrayal are all there, making it a rollercoaster ride. It's a remarkably impressive debut from John Krokidas who, hitherto, has only made shorts and earned a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance.

The acting is nigh-on flawless throughout. As Ginsberg, Daniel Radcliffe is superb and shows he is a huge talent. Forget Harry Potter; it's to his credit that, by his own admission, he deliberately refused to watch James Franco in the role in Howl so that his own performance wouldn't be influenced in any way. Jack Huston (nephew of both Angelica and Danny and currently on the London stage in Strangers on a Train) is compelling as Jack Kerouac, as is Dane DeHaan as the unpredictable and self-centred Lucien Carr. Then there is TV's Dexter, Michael C. Hall, who is wonderfully pathetic as David Kammerer, a brilliant lecturer obsessed with Carr.

9/10

Exceptional - Gold Award

Kill Your Darlings is a powerful story of love and betrayal and a seriously impressive debut from Krokidas, who lays claim to being the latest in a group of new directors to make stunning first features - J. C. Chandor (Margin Call, All Is Lost), David Lowery (Ain't Them Bodies Saints) are two that come instantly to mind. If their debuts are anything to go by, they are a sign of bold, adventurous things to come. The cinematic Beat Poets, perhaps?