While Harry Potter losing his butt-virginity does offer a certain fascination, there’s little else to recommend Kill Your Darlings, the generally terrible new film from first-time director John Krokidas that describes a pivotal event in the formation of the Beat movement.
In 1944, a Columbia undergrad named Lucien Carr murdered his former Boy Scout leader, 33-year-old David Kammerer, and then dumped the body in the Hudson River, claiming self-defense against a violent pederast. Before going to the police, Carr told his friends Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs about the crime, and they were subsequently arrested as accessories.
It’s an incredible story (check out the 2012 New York Times article “Where Death Shaped the Beats” for the full account), but here it’s rewritten as fan fiction in which handsome, brilliant young men yawp barbarically all over Manhattan.
Kill Your Darlings juxtaposes Carr’s crimes against the early days of the Beats, blaring jazz while Allen Ginsberg, Carr, Kerouac, and Burroughs sweat out the details of a bold new aesthetic philosophy. Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) is nervous, closeted, and utterly in thrall to Carr (Dane DeHaan), a handsome Slytherin with a cool disregard for authority who charms Ginsberg by jumping on a table in the middle of the Columbia University library and reciting Henry Miller. Carr’s sexual orientation remains ambiguous, but Ginsberg is smitten, and so is the much older Kammerer (Michael C. Hall, Hufflepuff), whose sexual relationship with Carr is strongly implied, and who grows increasingly menacing as the film progresses.
There’s an embarrassingly besotted quality to Kill Your Darlings; filmmaker Krokidas tries to pin down youth’s pretty butterflies and ends up a sweaty lepidopterist with dusty thumbprints on his glasses. The events that the film chronicles are fascinating, but Kill Your Darlings is too jittery and romanticized to do the material justice. 