Once upon a time, people who wanted to be writers read books. As opposed to today, where they tend to watch TV and movies. The phrase Kill Your Darlings means to cut out all the flowery prose that sounds like Shakespeare or Keats or Chaucer or Proust. Little enough chance of that happening these days. This is due in part to a number of rebel rousing Beat writers-including our heroes here-Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and the star of the movie who inspired them all to greatness-Lucien Carr.
Hmm, what’s that you say? You never heard of Lucien Carr? Well, neither has anyone else, which makes him the perfect central character in a movie about murder, intrigue, and homosexuality in the 1940s.
Kill Your Darlings tells the story of our Beat heroes and shows them to be drug using, booze guzzling, rule breaking college kids. What makes them different from any other drug using, booze guzzling, rule breaking college kids is that they all went on to become famous. The only person of interest who is not Young, Dumb and Full of Cum is David Kammerer, a stereotypical older homosexual who has an obsession with one of our young heroes-Mr Carr. Allen Ginsberg is also obsessed with Mr Carr. And Mr Carr is shown to be both a nontalent of no import whatsoever, and the sole reason for the birth of the Beat movement. There is a lot of random running around and a lot of profound talk that means nothing and finally there is a death. Was it murder? Or self defense? Or the wonderfully odd ‘Honor Killing’ defense in which a straight man can kill a gay man with impunity. Kind of a homosexual Stand Your Ground. Allen, who is gay, has a hard time agreeing with this line of defense.
Kill Your Darlings was an interesting movie. Daniel Radcliffe plays a leaner and meaner Harry Potter, right down to the round frames on his glasses. Michael C. Hall isn’t completely convincing as the obsessed older homosexual-sorry, it’s too soon for me to see Dexter as gay. And the rest of the cast was just there. They did fine as 1940s era set dressing.
Which brings me to my only real gripe about Kill Your Darlings, whoever picked out the music needs to be shot. Several times the 1940s cast is subjected to crappy rap and punk music which is about as jarring to the senses as possible. I suppose they could have played Revolution Number 9 if they really wanted to fit the music to the drug addled subject, but the songs they did pick sucked.
Otherwise, it looked good and I liked the costumes. It was an odd coming of age story that took itself a little too seriously.
