Kill Your Darlings
A compelling origin story for some of America's great storytellers.
Overview
Harry Potter is dead. He has ceased to be. He has expired, gone to meet his maker, 100 percent Avada Kedavra'd and this time love 'aint gonna bring him back. Be it known that his murderer was one Daniel 'never gonna pigeonhole me' Radcliffe, who killed off the boy wizard with a lethal dose of convincing American accent and a heady trinity of straight sex, gay sex and self-sex.
But Kill Your Darlings is not a murder mystery. The title actually refers to some sage literary advice that writers ought delete their most beloved passages since they're inevitably the most self-indulgent. The film does open with a murder and revisits it in the climax, yet at its heart it is a coming-of-age tale for its protagonist — famed US poet Allen Ginsberg (Radcliffe).
It's set in Manhattan during the early 1940s, when Ginsberg was just a college freshman at Colombia University, studying the classics but experiencing a growing disdain for the established order. Inspired by the free verse of Walt Whitman and the free spirit of his dormitory buddy Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), Ginsberg quickly fell down the sex-drugs-and-alcohol-fuelled rabbit hole of the underground literary sect, befriending future luminaries like Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster). This was the beat generation finding its rhythm, and in that sense Kill Your Darlings tells something of an origin story for some of America's great storytellers.
In the lead, Radcliffe's Ginsberg is a performance of transformation, not just of the character but for the actor, too. Both begin the film as timid young men in an alluring yet perilous world, burdened with complicated pasts and uncertain of how their contemporaries will judge them. By its end, they emerge as commanders of their art; fearless poets and performers. The wide-eyed wonderment with which Radcliffe's Potter viewed his magical world appears again here, though the temptations and possibilities are of an entirely different nature.
Most notable is his infatuation with the manipulative Carr, played to perfection by DeHaan (The Place Beyond The Pines). Though never fully demonised, Carr's very much the villain in Kill Your Darlings — a blue-eyed, blonde-haired paramour whose hapless devotees (including Michael C. Hall) will do anything to please him, including writing assignments on his behalf. There's more than a bit of DiCaprio in the young actor, who's quickly ratcheting up an impressive backlog of performances, and his on-screen chemistry with Radcliffe is entirely engaging.
There's a lot to like about this movie, and compared to other recent beat-era films (On The Road, Howl) it is easily the best. Filmed over just 24 days, it suffers from the occasional rough edges — both cinematically and textually — however, its fine performances and fascinating subject matter make it more than worth your while.
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