Kill Your Darlings (2013)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is one of those movies that really is what you think it is. One of those generic Hollywood coming-of-age stories that masquerades under the guise of a true story.We can't know how the real poets looked like and behaved during their time in Columbia, but they certainly didn't looked so damn stylish and polished as they look in this movie. Everything is very very fake, the hairstyles, the lavish rooms, the flamboyant clothes, the exorbitant lifestyle, and the characters dancing on modern rock songs.The film is a mess.It starts very stylishly with poetic quotes, and posh aesthetics. The scenes are really glossed and polished, everything seems to be working well, up to the point when the film realizes that beneath the facade there has to be some substance, a plot that drives the action. And suddenly in the third act, so to speak, a murder takes place, one as messy as the film. Suddenly characters start to show motivations and characteristics that weren't previously established.The film focuses on Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, but somewhere in between William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are thrown in, and the viewers are supposed to react to them based on their knowledge on the people they are based on.Daniel Radcliffe's performance is as wooden as his Harry Potter's, at least his American accent is decent. If one is knowledgeable about films in general, one would realize that the direction and editing do the job for Daniel, the director knew where to cut and where to move the camera from Daniel. Ben Foster shines, while Michael C. Hall is not given the material he needs. Funny enough, Hall portrays a gay character named David, just as his character in Six Feet Under.The film is a giant chaos of a mess. This is something that can be seen a lot in Hollywood: a lot of colors and cool music, but no substance what-so-ever.

it is not easy to make a coherent film about beat generation. because the images are not the inspired vehicle for translate the spirit of a movement who has so many levels. because the actor remains hostage of one character who, in not frequent cases, represents a real piece from the movement. Kill Your Darlings is a good example for that. Daniel Rascliffe does a decent job and he must be admired for the nuances of character who uses. Dane DeHaan has as basic tool a wise ambiguity who becomes essence of his character and the only axis who sustain an exotic figure in search of the triumph who defines each teenager. the result- a sketch. interesting but useful only as introduction/ first step to discover a fascinating period who represents more than meetings of few young men in search of fundamental truth.

Over the past few years, the Beat Generation that spawned writers and poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac has returned to cinema screens in documentaries ('William S. Burroughs: A Man Within'), bio-pics ('Howl') and adaptations of their work ('On the Road'). However, none has covered the time period where all of these writers met in college and were part of a murder. First time feature filmmaker John Krokidas tackles this story and knocks it out of the park with his jazzy, drug-induced opus called 'Kill Your Darlings'.This film shows the very beginning of the Beat Generation, including the friendships and influences that shaped these iconic writers that we study today. 'Kill Your Darlings' starts out almost like a thriller in the vein of 'Se7en', with Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) in a jail cell, talking to his supposed friend who has just murdered somebody. We then flash back to earlier in the year, when the young Allen heads out to college for the first time.This is a difficult decision for Allen. His father Louis (David Cross, who actually played Allen Ginsberg in Todd Haynes' 'I'm Not There'), wants his son to stay home and look after his unstable, schizophrenic mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Nonetheless, Allen ships off to Columbia University, which he's clearly emotional about. During his orientation, an older and very charismatic student named Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) leaps onto the library desk and shouts out sexually explicit writings from Henry Miller. This peaks Allen's interest immediately.The two become friends. Lucien takes Allen under his sick and twisted wing, showing him the insane New York nightlife – its jazz clubs with sketchy characters, and a great deal of drugs. At an apartment party, Allen meets William Burroughs (Ben Foster), who's first seen sitting in a bathtub, fully clothed and inhaling nitrous oxide. A little later, he's introduced to Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), the oldest of the bunch. Kerouac is charming and tough, but has problems with his girlfriend (Elizabeth Olsen, who in my opinion is not used to her full talent here).Still coming to terms with his who he is, Allen begins to have feelings for Lucien. However, he soon realizes that Lucien uses his charm and sex appeal to get what he wants, like making Allen write his college essays for him, since he doesn't have any real talent of his own. Through this time, the four writers hit the town in a drug induced stupor. These drug-fueled nights send Allen banging away at his typewriter keyboard, even pleasuring himself while writing.Some of the best parts of the film involve watching these future iconic writers simply being college kids and friends. They laugh, drink, smoke and even pull pranks. One scene resembles something out of 'Animal House', as the four break into the library after dark to swap the literature passages displayed in glass cases with images of porn and death. Director Krokidas uses modern music to show that these students were ahead of their time and had a rebellious side.Eventually, Krokidas constructs a sequence that culminates with the Riverside Park murder of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), a peripheral friend with a creepily unhealthy obsession with Lucien.The actors all turn in amazing performances. Radcliffe and DeHaan shine over the rest, since they have much more to work with. DeHaan gives Lucien so much magnetism and charm that it's hard not to like him, even though we shouldn't.Not only is this a movie about a murder, it's a movie about some of the most famous authors of the 20th Century, finding out who they are and who they will eventually set out to be. It sure is one hell of a coming of age story.

KILL YOUR DARLINGS isn't just one bad movie, it's five bad movies! There are so many stories it does not tell, so many themes it cannot explore, so much overall phoniness and shallow ignorance of life, the universe, and everything.It's not a moving coming-of-age story. Nor a thoughtful analysis of Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Nor an evocative film about the World War II era. Nor a chilling crime drama, even though the climax involves a brutal stabbing. Nor a stark, uncompromising look at the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, even though every single character is presented as some kind of addict. Nor an honest and candid exploration of the social pressures of college life then or now. There were at least five or six good movies you could have made with this material, and instead they made this foul sewage. As I watched this movie, I kept wondering if I was being unfair. I mean, given how vile all the characters are, and how ugly and sad the ending is, could anyone have done a better job? But then I thought of THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, based on the life of Jim Carroll, starring Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio. Ugly scenes of drug abuse? Brutally real violence? The emptiness of higher education stripped bare? Homosexuality right in your face? It's all there, but in THE BASKETBALL DIARIES the stakes are much higher. These people really matter. Even the poetry sounds better!KILL YOUR DARLINGS could have been a good movie. But it wasn't. And by the way, the "Beat" movement was not a club for gay men. Plenty of gay men hated the Beats. And plenty of Beats hated gay men. There was no love lost between Truman Capote and Jack Kerouac. In fact, Truman Capote famously said of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, "that's not writing, that's typing." It's movies like this that give teenage homosexual murderers a bad name.