KILL YOUR DARLINGS (2013) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Krokidas
Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C. Hall,
Ben Foster, Jack Huston, David Cross, John Cullum,
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Elizabeth Olsen, Erin Drake
The birth of the Beats. How Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr came together at Columbia University in the 1940s and started what would become a literary revolution. Allen's the new kid, a freshman just arrived from Paterson, New Jersey. Lucien's the brilliant, arrogant instigator who introduces hm to the jazz scene and the gay haunts on Christopher Street. Burroughs is experimenting with whatever drugs he can get his hands on, and Kerouac, the ex-football hero and sometime merchant seaman, has already written a million words. And there's the matter of David Kammerer, whose obsession with Lucien would have consequences for all of them. "Beat", a movie from 2000 with Courtney Love and Kiefer Sutherland, covered some of the same territory, but this one does it better, going deeper into the energy, camaraderie, intellectual daring and freewheeling, borderline madness that drove the Beats. You can almost taste the booze and smell the cigarette smoke.
