Its title comes from an axiom to ‘murder’ extraneous bits of style from one’s writing or art, but Kill Your Darlings works supremely as a stylish, engaging drama about the early days of the Beat generation. It also features career-best turns from Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan, as poet Allan Ginsberg and his acid-tongued friend Lucien Carr, respectively.
Based on a true story, the film focuses on these young, dangerous minds and other friends – including Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) – during the freewheeling mid-1940s. Allan and Lucien want to abandon the tenets of traditional poetry and begin a more experimental manifesto dependent more on free verse. Writer/director John Krokidas focuses on these sly minds who want to slay each other with wit and words, and mines riveting emotional depth with his stellar cast.
The main draws of Kill Your Darlings are Radcliffe and DeHaan, and they both give exceptional performances. As a timid Ginsberg soon driven wild by same-sex thoughts, Radcliffe is revealing and vulnerable. The main find is DeHaan though, magnetic in every scene with a reptilian smile and James Dean haircut, an angel-headed rebel whose quest for literary freedom ignites something within Ginsberg. Under Krokidas’ direction, who enlivens the story with a pulsating, jazz-fueled atmosphere and music associated with the Beat lifestyle, we begin to care deeply about these self-absorbed outcasts.
For more on Kill Your Darlings, check out our exclusive video interview with the cast and director below.
