More than words
Kill Your Darlings tells true story of young Beat writers
Near the beginning of the Beat Generation love story Kill Your Darlings, there is a scene that will be familiar to most moviegoers: Daniel Radcliffe, playing a wide-eyed young man of almost bewitching gifts that he may have inherited from his father, is going up the steps of a legendary school. There, he will help create a kind of revolution.
The year is 1943, the school is Columbia University, and the young man is Allen Ginsberg, a wouldbe poet who’s about to fall into the clutches of a creative cabal of selfpossessed young men, wild-living writers whose poetry discards both rhyme and metre.
Kill Your Darlings is based on a true story involving two fringe characters of the age: Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), ringleader of an anti-establishment group that worshipped William Butler Yeats, and David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), a professor who was smitten by Carr and stalked him from school to school, writing his papers for him and professing his love at every turn. The movie opens with Carr killing Kammerer, a scandal that was to involve not only Ginsberg but his coconspirators in hipsterdom, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
The result is a kind of gay triangle that puts Carr in the middle of a web of self-involvement. Burroughs (Ben Foster) is introduced lying in a bathtub in a Greenwich Village apartment inhaling from a container of nitrous oxide, and he pretty much stays on the fringes. Kerouac (Jack Huston), a handsome football star, has a bigger role, mostly as Carr’s new erotic interest, but this isn’t his story either, and he’s years from going On the Road and changing literature.
The real star is DeHaan, whose shockingly blue eyes and Leonardo DiCaprio sex appeal smite all the men within range: he’s pretty well the town flirt. This is dangerous at the time and has to be repressed, adding to the inherent emotional dangers.
There are enough of them. Ginsberg’s father Louis (David Cross) is a poet who watches his son’s use of rhetoric carefully. His mother Naomi (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is mentally ill. At school, he falls under Carr’s spell, and Radcliffe inhabits the character with just the right sense of halfformed instinct and emerging passion. (For the record, he also takes part in several gay love scenes.)
Working with a script by Austin Bunn, freshman director John Krokidas faithfully evokes the look of the era but hammers home every perceived irony and contradiction. This tends to load up the movie, which isn’t allowed to speak for itself: the fame of the participants works against it in a way, adding layers of meaning and ironies that muffle the central tragedy.