Title: Kill Your Darlings

Opens: October 16, 2013

Unless you’re a Broadway fan or you watched him recently in the film “Woman in Black,” you’ve never before seen Daniel Radcliffe like this. For that matter, you’re not likely to have seen Allen Ginsberg, whom Radcliffe portrays in John Krokidas’s “Kill Your Darlings,” like this, since you probably remember him in middle age, bald with long hair in the back and a scruffy beard. Krokidas, adapting co-writer Austin Bunn’s story, shows Ginsberg and his clique in the mid-1940’s, a shy, nerdish virgin who learns more from his pals William Burroughs (Ben Foster), David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and especially Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) than he could have absorbed from the lectures of his professor (John Callum).

Living with his famous poet father Louis Ginsberg (David Cross) in Paterson, New Jersey, Radcliffe’s Ginsberg, whose mother suffers from psychosis and is later committed to an institution, is accepted to Columbia College, moves to the dorm, and after a brief introduction to his square roommate falls in with a crowd that we know now to be the most famous acolytes of the “Beat Generation” (the term “Beat” is never used in this movie since it was not invented until 1948 by Mr. Kerouac).

In a stunning portrayal of the gifted, troubled homosexual student Lucien Carr, Dane DeHaan, as a handsome blonde, has a penchant for starting trouble. At one point he interrupts a tour of the school library by standing on a desk quoting some obscenities of Henry Miller. Lucien brings the shy, budding poet into his inner circle while at the same time playing cool with his lover, David Kammerer. The aim of the clique is to abandon the old writings, which in one scene they do by tearing up the books of Charles Dickens and the like, later to cast a new spell on the land with original poetry—perhaps not realizing that even they were following the ideas of the New England Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The friendship of these would-be Beat writers is reflected by some sharp editing, the film virtually bookmarked by a shot of Lucien in jail for the murder of his former lover, David Kammerer, who had been so taken with Lucien that to be near him, he gave up his post teaching college English to be a janitor’s helper in exchange for rent.

Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg anchors the movie, a young man whose college days are to form the basis of his later fame as one of the most awarded poets in U.S. history, albeit a dropout from Columbia when his professor (possibly modeled after Lionel Trilling) turns Allen’s final exam, a work of original fiction, into the department dean (David Rasche) alleging “smut.” When given the option to rewrite the final paper or be expelled, he chooses the latter, giving the impression that the best way to get your fifteen minutes of fame and then some is to drop out and carve out your own niche, even if that niche requires joining the Merchant Marines in the hope of getting to Paris to celebrate the end of the war in ’45.

A look at the youths of Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg in Wikipedia assures us that scripters Krokidas and Bunn have hewed to the truth, though we wonder about one comic scene in which Allen picks up a student library helper who, after a four-minutes’ chat, introduces him to sex in the stacks. Harry Potter fans will be shocked.

Rated R. 102 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – B+