Kill Your Darlings, 7.12.13

John Krokidas’s sexy and enjoyable movie, the third on the Beats in as many years (and the best), recreated the early student days of the Beats at Columbia in 1944.  While some young men were spilling their guts at Anzio, others were engaged in more ‘normal’ adolescent rites-of-passage: murder, buggery and the like!

The student Beats were shown posing as sexual and literary rebels while disguising their insecurities behind competitive testosterone-driven displays of intellect. 

Moody freeze-framed B&W scenes from Greenwich Village jazz clubs were intercut with lecture hall rebellions against academic orthodoxies (“there is no creativity without imitation”) and symbolic liberations of banned transgressive works (Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” etc). 

Daniel Redcliffe as Allen Ginsberg

Daniel Radcliffe was impressively convincing as the young Allen Ginsberg, whose unrequited puppy love for strutting aesthete Lucien Carr segues into offering himself fearlessly to strangers in Village bars. 

Pouting blue-eyed blond Dane DeHaan (a kind of male Scarlett Johansson) was Lucien Carr, the devil-may-care garçon fatal.  Carr, proclaimer of a so-called “New Vision” for literature (yes, another one) and the original dedicatee of ‘Howl’, provided much of the intellectual (and other) energy to the Beats. 


Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac (L);
Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr (R)

There was a fun vignette where Carr was shown giving his name as ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ on trying to enlist with the Navy, although funnier still was the scene where Radcliffe/Ginsberg is shown being blown by a horny cantilevered female librarian beneath serried shelves of dusty college tomes, only ‘to get off' himself once DeHaan/Carr eyeballs him back.

On a more elevated note, the flick’s theme was perhaps that the creative impulse (primarily here Ginsberg’s poetry) is escapist, driven by a desire to flee the complicated mess of life into a reality that the protagonist hopes to shape and control more easily.


Radcliffe's Ginsberg tries to go mano-a-mano
with DeHaan's Carr

The film turned darker with the “honor slaying” (according to NY’s antediluvian penal code) of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr (“Another lover hits the universe; the circle is broken”).  

Carr, “the Fourth Beat” (after Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac) was depicted, arguably with some licence, as profiting from a “gay panic defence” to ‘get away with’ a mere eighteen months in jail for the murder of his besotted ex-lover. (He went on to sire three children and to head up UPI’s NY news bureau for decades, only finally shuffling off his mortal coil in 2005 long after the other major Beats were dust.)

Poseurs, nous?
Radcliffe as Ginsberg, DeHaan as Carr,
Huston as Kerouac

Michael C Hall (from ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘Dexter’) 'played gay' once again as the bearded stalker-cum-murder-victim, while Jennifer Jason Leigh (“Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle”) was Ginsberg’s disturbed Mom, who was carted off to the psychiatric hospital that more than one character from this virtual roll-call of case-studies might well have benefited from! 

Although the disturbing murder scene carried echoes of Tom Kalin’s “Swoon” (1992), the prevailing tone of Krokidas’s movie was more playful and less pretentious.  That said, the parents amongst you probably still won’t want your offspring watching it before they too go up to university!