Susan Granger’s review of “Kill Your Darlings” (Sony Pictures Classics)
While he’ll always be grateful to J.K. Rowling, Daniel Radcliffe would rather you forget about his
“Harry Potter” days. To that end, he’s choosing weird projects like this, simply because they pique his interest.
“I have a massive chip on my shoulder,” Radcliffe admits. When you fall into something at age 11 and get paid incredible amounts of money for your entire teenage years for doing a job that anyone would want, there’s a part of you that thinks everybody doubts your ability to act. I feel it less nowadays, but it’s taken a long time to get to this place.”
In 1944, when Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), Allen Ginsberg (Radcliffe) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster) were college students at Columbia, recklessly experimenting with drugs, poetry and homosexuality in the bohemian jazz clubs of Greenwich Village, they were influenced by a charismatic classmate, Lucien Carr (scene-stealing Dane Dehaan). Androgynous Carr, in turn, became the obsession of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), his creepy former teacher/ex-boyfriend. One night, on a lonely path in Riverside Park, Carr stabbed Kammerer to death, trussed him up and dumped him the Hudson River. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs were implicated in the murder through guilt by association; Kerouc and Burroughs later wrote a novel about the case which Carr, who became a respected journalist/editor, legally suppressed until his death in 2005.
Somewhat incoherently written by director John Krokidas and his former Yale roommate, Austin Bunn, this melodrama evolves in fragments, presenting yet another aspect of the Beat Generation, following “Howl,” “On the Road” and “Big Sur.” Authentic as the gullible, gay poet from Paterson, New Jersey, Radcliffe displays more range than he has before. While confident of his precocious genius, his bespectacled Ginsberg is sensitive, sullen and socially insecure, and there’s a touching subplot about his poet father (David Cross) and emotionally-unstable mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Kill Your Darlings” is a subversively stylish, seedy 6, evoking nostalgia for a hallucinogenic period almost seven decades ago.
