Kill Your Darlings **** (2013, Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C Hall) – Movie Review

Daniel Radcliffe stars as Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) in this riveting biographical drama about the early adult years of the beat generation literary stalwarts. Kill Your Darlings is extremely engrossing, beautifully crafted and marvellously well done. There are lots of complex ideas and ambiguous messages in a very intelligent and thought-provoking screenplay. Radcliffe is outstanding, but all the acting is remarkable.

Ginsberg is an insecure 17-year-old just starting as an English major at posh Ivy League college Columbia University, in the late 1940s. There he meets and falls under the spell of Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), a hugely attractive personality but a very mixed-up kid indeed. He lives in good company, though: his buddies are Jack Kerouac (1922-69), played by Jack Huston, and William Burroughs (1914-97), played by Ben Foster.

Unfortunately, though Carr and Ginsberg may love complications, they’ve got a few too many for a sane existence, though not for a good movie. For that, the more complications, the better. Bring on the complications!

Ginsberg’s mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is suicidally potty, clinging desperately to him, while he tries to have a life, a new life, now one of poetry, literature, drugs and fun with Lucien. Ginsberg’s dad (David Cross) has found someone else and gets mom put away somewhere. Lucien has complications too, principally that he can’t settle down with anyone, he’s a flirty tease, he can’t really admit he’s gay and is still being relentlessly pursued by his older ex and mentor David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) with whom he has history.

Eventually, Ginsberg tells Lucien, cut him loose, sparking a tragedy. And finally there’s a killing in 1944.

Radcliffe (already too old at 24!) gives an accomplished, brave performance, DeHaan is dazzling, as he has to be. The movie belongs to the two of them. Everyone else is excellent, just right, but Radcliffe and DeHaan are truly special and memorable. Their performances are the making of the film.

The film is not a biopic or portrait of a literary legend or a picture of the beat generation. Instead its a twisted coming-of-age story, with the hero trying desperately to negotiate the hurdles of falling in love for the first time and being initiated into the world of erotic and free-spirited literature and the drug culture of the day.

It seeks a poetic dimension and achieves it. It’s a complex, complicated movie that sends out many signals, a lot of them conflicting. It could be accused of being pretentious, it’s that un-straightforward. But, as with poetry, it’s there to make of it what you will, take from it what you can. No messages, no preaching, just chunky adult-orientated art movie. It’s co-written and directed by John Krokidas (aged 40), in his highly promising feature debut.

All the time you have to pinch yourself and keep saying this is Harry Potter, the boy who couldn’t act a decade or so ago. Working on stage at 17, or probably the preparation for that, turned him into an actor. Now, he can become convincingly American, convincingly 1940s, convincingly gay on screen. He gets his kit off (again! – that’s three films in a row!), kisses a couple of blokes and gets his legs in the air. Well, that’s showbiz!  Radcliffe’s short on neither talent not daring. He’s rapidly turning from the lad who used to be Harry Potter into a national treasure.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Movie Review

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