Kill Your Darlings (2013)

Film: Kill Your Darlings (2013)
Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Jack Huston, Ben Foster, Michael C. Hall, Elizabeth Olsen
Director: Jack Krokidas
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

For some reason Hollywood doesn't seem to coordinate as well as it should.  Remember that summer of two asteroid movies?  Or the back-to-back year of Truman Capote biopics?  Hollywood tends to do something multiple times if they are going to do it at all, and we as an audience don't protest too vociferously for some reason (for all of the complaining, both of those asteroid movies were massive hits).

So it is currently with independent cinema's fascination with the Beat Generation.  In recent years, arguably the two most significant books from the Beat Generation (Howl and On the Road) have been adapted into films, and now we have Kill Your Darlings, a biopic about the very early Beat Generation, once again channelling Allen Ginsberg (for some reason Ginsberg seems to be at the forefront of all of these stories rather than some of the other authors of the movement) and telling of the Lucien Carr trial in 1944.

(Real life has no spoilers...but here's your alert anyway) The film, told in the way that the Beats would have been proud, is a combination of both a slam piece and a celebration of the Beat Generation.  We get all of the principle players from the early Beat Generation: Ginsberg (Radcliffe), Jack Kerouac (Huston), William S. Burroughs (Foster), and the far lesser known Lucian Carr (DeHaan).  The film unfolds at first as if this is simply an origin story about Ginsberg.  We see his struggles with his mother, mentally insane, and his complicated relationship with his poet father.  We then see him go to Columbia, where he meets Carr, an older student, and falls in love with him.  Carr invites him into the world of the Beat Generation, and he also becomes acquainted with Carr's older mentor David Kammerer (Hall), who is romantically obsessed with Carr.

The film continues on with a celebration of the Beat Generation's provocative push to redefine moral standards, particularly regarding sex and sexuality.  There's a prank involving breaking into a university library and putting all of the sexual and "obscene" literature in a glass case at the front of the library.  There's frequent discussions of sex, and the physical objectification of Carr and Kerouac in particular.  And then the mystery starts to unfold.  Carr decides to leave behind Ginsberg and Kammerer, following perhaps the only man in his orbit that is not completely taken with him (Kerouac), and join the merchant marines.  On his way there, he is stopped by Kammerer, and then in a park Carr kills Kammerer, making the entire second half of the film about his trial.

The trial goes roughly how you would expect, particularly if you were familiar with this piece of the Beat history.  Carr is given a very light sentence, using the defense that he was a straight man being pursued by the older, predatory homosexual Kammerer.  The film leaves a large amount of doubt around Carr's sexuality, as has been the rumor for a number of years, and ends with Ginsberg trying to tell the "real" story of what happened that night, only to be shut down by the press and his university.

The film's message is partially what makes it interesting, and also where it falls a bit flat.  The film wants to present an ambiguous ending to the story, but it doesn't quite get there.  As presented, the film doesn't give us enough balance with Carr's character to really have us doubt that he was in fact "playing the heterosexual."  Carr's character is too sexually open and flirtatious with everything that moves to convincingly state that he is in fact wholly straight, and if that's what the director is trying to make us believe, he is unsuccessful.  The director also clearly is trying to sell the fact that Carr's self-defense against Kammerer is murky at best, and his vision is that more likely the man committed cold-blood murder and got away with it.  That's blatantly what the film is selling, though it never has the guts to say it (perhaps for legal reasons, admittedly), and as a result the ending seems not to jive with what we have just seen.

The film is saved by the central performance of Dane DeHaan.  While Radcliffe is a bit out of his element (while a competent actor, he has yet to show the ability that Emma Watson has to morph away from his most noted role into that of an actor who can transform, though I do admire his willingness to tinker around in independent cinema rather than just take blockbuster roles), DeHaan is magnificent to the core.  Lucien Carr as written has to be both dangerous and incredibly alluring, and DeHaan finds that tricky balance.  Much in the same way that Garrett Hedlund in On the Road could combine sexual allure (everybody wants him) with a laissez-faire attitude toward life and in particular responsibility, DeHaan strikes that chord, being the sexual desire of almost everyone onscreen (and that's with an actor playing Jack Kerouac nearby), and both lusting the attention and dismissing it.  I've seen DeHaan in a few things now (including The Place Beyond the Pines, which he was also terrific in), and I have to say that he seems like one of those actors ready to explode.

Those were about all my thoughts on Kill Your Darlings, a strong attempt that gets lost in delivery (with a very strong central performance from DeHaan to recommend it).  What were your thoughts?  Did you enjoy the film?  Do you find DeHaan to be as intoxicating as I?  And what piece of Beat literature do you hope is transferred to the screen next?  Share in the comments!