Back in April, one of my assignments for class was to pick any movie and review it. The following is that review. Keep in mind that this is my first movie review, so be kind.
Kill Your Darlings is a 2013 biographical film, directed by John Krokidas. It first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to positive reviews. The film is about the 1950s beat poet Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) as he enters his first year at Columbia University in New York City. It plays heavily on his relationship with fellow student Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) as they band together to bring the Beat Generation to life.
The movie has a good start with Dane DeHaan’s Lucien Carr being in prison. It sets up the mystery of the film. Throughout the film, they do a great job of setting up questions and mysteries that they will answer later on: the beginning, where Lucien is in jail; the middle, where the dean of Columbia tells Carr he “knows what happened in Chicago,” and a subtle insinuation that all may not be well with David Kammerer’s (Michael C. Hall) fate. Daniel Radcliffe’s accent right from the get-go is a little bit awkward, but that might be just because I’m used to his regular accent (although I did see him on Broadway in How To Succeed…). As the movie progresses, it gets much better. The pace of the movie is a little bit slow, but it doesn’t take away from the message because it fits the tone of the time period. Once at Columbia, Ginsberg begins to come out of his shell and immediately takes an interest in Carr, and vice-versa, though Carr’s reasons for taking an interest in Ginsberg are different than why Ginsberg likes Carr. As soon as their relationship begins, it flows quickly and easily, but it is clear that Carr is using Ginsberg for his own personal gain, and Ginsberg is willing to let him if it means he can stay close to Carr.
The scene between the librarian and Ginsberg is incredibly awkward and severs only as highlight to Ginsberg’s sexuality and proof that he is willing to do whatever he can for Carr. Similarly, Kammerer will obviously do anything for Carr and to keep him to himself, and in fact tries on several occasions to out Carr, while Ginsberg is desperately clinging to him. This is why Ginsberg and Kammerer’s relationship is so tense, because both men know that they want the same thing and they are, in many ways, similarly desperate to get what they want (Carr).
When Carr finally rids himself of Kammerer, it is under Ginsberg’s encouragement, showing the way in which Carr and Ginsberg push each other to be brave and make each other better/worse in different ways.
Something that I found interesting throughout the film – a theme that carried the pace – was the constant cycle between fantasy and reality. This is evident most often when Ginsberg is around Carr. Carr tempts Ginsberg with dreams, talk of wild splendor, and Ginsberg often is starstruck at the idea. However, as soon as he begins to sink into Carr’s fantasy, something happens to break it, to jolt Ginsberg back to the real world. The first time this is evident is when Ginsberg first meets Carr, and is promptly invited to go to a bar with him. He is dazed by the way Carr talks about this place, and ignores a phone call from his mother telling him to go home in order to go with Carr. He falls into fantasy for a night, and the next morning he visits his mother to find that she is being carted away to a mental institution. She blames him for what is happening to her, and the fantasy shatters. This occurs several more times, but another prominent time is when Carr, along with Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), seduces Ginsberg with the idea of joining the merchant marines, going to Paris, and making a new life for themselves in the center of the poetic world. This fantasy is immediately broken by the arrest of Ginsberg, Carr, and Kerouac for stealing a boat. An important transition from the love of the fantasy to the love of the reality is shown when Ginsberg and Carr kiss under the tree while Kerouac is off in the distance. As soon as Kerouac comes back, the fantasy of being with Carr in the way Ginsberg wants is shattered. He immediately takes advantage of Ginsberg in the way that he took advantage of Kammerer, showing Allen that he is merely a replacement of Kammerer. After this point, there is no more fantasy versus reality. Ginsberg is able to see the way in which Carr is using him and any attempt to bring Ginsberg back to the fantasy world is in vain.
The movie really plays on the way in which Carr uses Ginsberg for his own gain, emphasized especially in the confrontation that Ginsberg and Carr have when Carr is leaving to “join the merchant marines” with Jack. After that fantasy ends, and Carr is in jail, he still uses Ginsberg for his own personal gain, getting Ginsberg to write his deposition for him because he can’t do it himself. The fact that Ginsberg actually does write his deposition serves to show that even though he knows Carr is using him, even though he stood up for himself, even though there’s nothing Carr can do if he doesn’t write the paper, his love for Carr has such a strong hold on him that he still cannot bear to lose him.
The set up they give of Radcliffe’s Allen Ginsberg’s family is solid, they had a good way of ‘showing, not telling’ that Ginsberg’s mother was mentally unstable. All in all, I think Krokidas did a great job of playing on the relationship between the two young men, particularly focusing on the poisonous aspects of it. The cinematography wasn’t anything extraordinary, but the story overpowered most of the sub-par technical aspects. All in all, I enjoyed the movie; I thought it was a very strong choice for both DeHaan and Radcliffe, and they played their parts well.
i've seen those english dramas, too 