Kill your Darlings

Today's film is called "Kill your Darlings" which was directed by John Krokidas and stars Daniel Radcliffe. This film centres around the Riverside Park killing which was an infamous early chapter in the story of the Beat writers.

Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg

In the film, an adolescent Allen Ginsberg (Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe), who is caring for his mentally ill mother, is told by his father (Arrested Development's David Cross) that he is accepted into Columbia University in New York City. Upon arrival, he befriends the talented hell-raising libertine Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) in Columbia University, New York. Ginsberg follows Carr into a circle of hedonistic writers which would ultimately become the Beat generation and includes William Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Boardwalk Empire's Jack Huston). Fuelled by copious amounts of booze, marijuana and jazz, they try to overthrow the established norms of literature by creating a new literary movement called "The New Vision" and rail against the stifling social and sexual conformity of 1940's America.

Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr

<SPOILER>

Among the group of writers is a childhood friend of Burroughs called David Kammerer who lectures at Columbia. According to Lucien Carr, he is blackmailing him to perform sexual favours for him in return for not being expelled from the university for copying term papers, although things may not be as clear-cut as that.

Michael C. Hall as David Kammerer

Carr eventually tries to reject Kammerer and tries to go and join the merchant marine with Jack Kerouac. However, Kammerer confronts Carr and Carr stabs him, after which he drowns Kammerer by placing stones in his pockets and placing him out to sea. He is subsequently arrested.

Carr asks Ginsberg to write his deposition for him for court where he will claim that it was an "honour killing", that is he killed Kammerer for being nothing more than a predatory homosexual who made unwanted advances. However, he discovers evidence to the contrary from Carr's mother who said there was a long history between them. Ginsberg instead writes a poem based on the events called "The Night in Question" which he submits as a term paper to his university. He is expelled but receives a letter from one of his professors encouraging him to keep writing.

Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac

<END SPOILER>

I have to say that I enjoyed Kill your Darlings and that it had some excellent performances, particularly Jack Huston as the ebullient and boisterous American football player and author Jack Kerouac.The characters are generally pompous, arrogant and self-indulgent so the film can be a difficult pill to swallow if you're not already interested in the early Beatniks. It can be argued that this is because the film is both a celebration and a critique of the culture and ideas these people propagated. More power to the filmmakers if this is true but a film cannot stand on its own as an intellectual exercise, it also has to be entertaining and engaging for the layman.

It has also been said by many who watch the film that it is a difficult business to make the act of typing on a typewriter to create a new literary movement interesting visually. The film uses jump cuts and an upbeat jazz soundtrack which just about did the trick for me but it left a lot of people feeling cold.