It's a story of the poet Allen Ginsberg's youth, from a nice Jewish kid in Patterson, New Jersey, to a dropout from Columbia University in 1944. This milieu -- and the neighborhood called North Beach in San Francisco -- produced the Beat Generation or Beatniks. Many of them, the ones we meet in this film, went on to considerable but ephemeral fame -- Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Ginsberg himself, probably best noted for his poem "Howl." The title, "Kill Your Darlings," is from William Faulkner who, taken either by a fit of absurdity or maybe drunkenness, advised writers to delete those passages in their manuscripts that they liked best. If you like something, you wind up obsessed and your judgment fails you.
I suppose that's the central theme of the film. Ginsberg falls for Lucien Carr and Carr rejects the importunings of his former lover, David Kammerer, and finally brutally murders Kammerer. I can understand Kammerer's obsession with Carr. Not that I understand eros between two men but I do understand obsession. It took me years to discover which major ocean port was in the middle of Czechoslovia.
Daniel Radcliffe is Ginsberg and although he has the name of one of the seven sisters he looks like Ginsberg probably looked -- puny with horn-rimmed glasses. I don't know what Lucien Carr looked like but I can believe he was something like Dane DeHaan -- beautiful and effete. Michael C. Hall is Kammerer, who begins as a commanding figure and winds up a shivering supplicant. All the performances are adequate but Hall's may be the best of the lot. Kerouac is a marginal figure, a football hero and athlete who can also read and write. William Burroughs, Ben Foster here, should do a one-man show as a young Harry Truman.
The atmosphere is rich, but the story doesn't quite come together, nor did I care much about who loved who. I don't quite know what happened towards the end. The director and editor turned the murder into the climax, understandably. But they rather spoiled it by giving us broad hints in flashbacks before what is supposed to be the full reveal. The shock they were presumably aiming at is diluted by the sometimes misleading adumbrations and by the generally confused sequence of events leading up to it. Besides, David Kammerer, as portrayed, was a ridiculous pain in the ass. And the title doesn't fit. Carr kills Kammerer, true, but Kammerer was no longer Carr's "darling". Just the other way round.
And I'm guessing at the constant early references to a revolution in literature -- about how things get more and more separated from their center and need to be pulled back by revolutionaries -- is borrowed from Yeats' "The Second Coming", the business about the widening gyre, except that everything these guys do, like destroying the classics in the Columbia library and substituting pornography, isn't "pulling back" at all. They're not calling the falcon back. They're setting him loose. Literary chaos is slouching towards Bethlehem.
Not that the stuff they produced can be easily dismissed. Ginsberg's "Howl", Kerouac's "On the Road," and Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" are unforgettable. They read poetry in front of jazz combos in North Beach and the Village. Is one permitted to ask about the aspirations of today's generation of college youths? Anyway, Ginsberg held his act together for the rest of his life, finally finding a steady lover. Kerouac became a smelly drunk, and Burroughs a junkie. But while it lasted -- what gusto!
I suppose that's the central theme of the film. Ginsberg falls for Lucien Carr and Carr rejects the importunings of his former lover, David Kammerer, and finally brutally murders Kammerer. I can understand Kammerer's obsession with Carr. Not that I understand eros between two men but I do understand obsession. It took me years to discover which major ocean port was in the middle of Czechoslovia.
Daniel Radcliffe is Ginsberg and although he has the name of one of the seven sisters he looks like Ginsberg probably looked -- puny with horn-rimmed glasses. I don't know what Lucien Carr looked like but I can believe he was something like Dane DeHaan -- beautiful and effete. Michael C. Hall is Kammerer, who begins as a commanding figure and winds up a shivering supplicant. All the performances are adequate but Hall's may be the best of the lot. Kerouac is a marginal figure, a football hero and athlete who can also read and write. William Burroughs, Ben Foster here, should do a one-man show as a young Harry Truman.
The atmosphere is rich, but the story doesn't quite come together, nor did I care much about who loved who. I don't quite know what happened towards the end. The director and editor turned the murder into the climax, understandably. But they rather spoiled it by giving us broad hints in flashbacks before what is supposed to be the full reveal. The shock they were presumably aiming at is diluted by the sometimes misleading adumbrations and by the generally confused sequence of events leading up to it. Besides, David Kammerer, as portrayed, was a ridiculous pain in the ass. And the title doesn't fit. Carr kills Kammerer, true, but Kammerer was no longer Carr's "darling". Just the other way round.
And I'm guessing at the constant early references to a revolution in literature -- about how things get more and more separated from their center and need to be pulled back by revolutionaries -- is borrowed from Yeats' "The Second Coming", the business about the widening gyre, except that everything these guys do, like destroying the classics in the Columbia library and substituting pornography, isn't "pulling back" at all. They're not calling the falcon back. They're setting him loose. Literary chaos is slouching towards Bethlehem.
Not that the stuff they produced can be easily dismissed. Ginsberg's "Howl", Kerouac's "On the Road," and Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" are unforgettable. They read poetry in front of jazz combos in North Beach and the Village. Is one permitted to ask about the aspirations of today's generation of college youths? Anyway, Ginsberg held his act together for the rest of his life, finally finding a steady lover. Kerouac became a smelly drunk, and Burroughs a junkie. But while it lasted -- what gusto!