Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Kill Your Darlings benefits enormously from a committed, charismatic performance by Daniel Radcliffe as young Allen Ginsberg, with strong support from Dane DeHaan as the magnetic and dangerous Lucien Carr. The film captures the bohemian energy and intellectual ferment of the nascent Beat Generation at Columbia with reasonable authenticity. Cinematography is competent and period-appropriate without being especially distinctive. The plot, while based on fascinating real events, follows a fairly conventional coming-of-age and crime-drama structure that doesn't fully exploit the richness of its subject matter. Novelty is moderate — the Beat Generation origin story is an intriguing angle but the execution leans on familiar biopic and literary-circle tropes. The ending resolves the murder storyline adequately but leaves the broader narrative feeling somewhat incomplete.