DANE DEHAAN AND DANIEL RADCLIFFE IN KILL YOUR DARLINGS

Galvanizing the Beats before they knew who they were

Kill Your Darlings is, in a way, just an Animal House flick, a tale of college boys partying and not doing their school work. But it's about the key figures of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, a Columbia freshman; Jack Kerouac, a recent Columbia dropout; the older William Burroughs recently graduated from Harvard, hanging around and doing drugs. The first-time director, John Krokidas, chooses not to sanctify them. They don't and we don't know yet they're destined to be famous. Primarily or ostensibly this is a coming of age tale about young Ginsberg, who comes from Patterson, New Jersey, thrilled to have gotten into Columbia. The news is Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg. The darling he's killing is his iconic Harry Potter identity, which he does perfectly well as a passionate, timid young man with poet ambitions. But the galvanizing force that brought all these guys together in Forties New York City is Lucien Carr, also a Columbia student. People will be talking about Radcliffe taking on Allen Ginsberg. They really should be talking about the performance of Dane DeHaan, playing "Lu" Carr.

DeHaan is said to closely resemble the actual Lucien Carr, but, especially with the blond rinse in his light brown hair, he reminds one of the young Leonardo DiCaprio. Ginsberg is on a tour of the Columbia library when Carr first appears, jumping up on a table and reciting a cock passage from Henry Miller and getting dragged off by guards, with Ginsberg grinning widely, already entranced. It's very reminiscent of the scene in Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse when DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud jumps up and pees down on a table occupied by the best artists and poets of nineteenth-century Paris. DeHaan has the same kind of bold, reedy, dangerous charm DiCaprio had then with perhaps a touch more inner focus and conviction. DeHaan brought his pale intensity to roles in the cool boy superpowers movie Chronicle and as one of the sons in the second part The Place Beyond the Pines and he has also been seen regularly on television's In Treatment. He has made several splashes on the New York stage and has multiple film roles behind him and coming. If the Oscars had the equivalent of the Césars' "Meilleur Espoir Masculin" he would be in line for one as one of the most promising young film actors today. Conventional in some ways, Kill Your Darlings still has a fresh time-frame -- it's a Beat Generation prequel -- and is a must-see for DeHaan's performance.

When Allen takes Carr to meet his family he says "it's complicated" and it is. His stable, successful minor poet dad (David Cross) sends his paranoid schizophrenic mother Naomi (soulfully played by the reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh) off to the looney bin and soon takes up with another woman. But Carr's world is complicated too. He's been stalked from Bowdoin to Chicago to Columbia by an increasingly deranged lover-mentor, David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), and the plot climax is where -- a fact long buried -- Carr kills his stalker. He gets off with 18 months using a "honor killing" law that made it okay to kill a homosexual predator if one was not oneself gay. Carr, who attempts suicide several times on screen and reportedly did once earlier, looks like a galvanizing force that would disappear and he did, but he did not die. The most surprising end note of the film is that he went on to be a married man with kids and a successful long time editor at United Press International. But he wanted his dicey sexuality and connection to the Beats forgotten and when Ginsberg dedicated Howl to him he insisted that all subsequent editions have that removed. Anyway this movie is largely about Lucien Carr's catalytic effect in the germination of the Beats, and thanks to the magic of Dane DeHaan, it's quite believable. As somebody has remarked, nobody can take their eyes off Carr in this movie and we can't either. (It's barely noted, but Burroughs had actually followed Kammerer and Carr from Chicago to New York.)

Krokidas is reduced to montages to show the "creative process," as well as the obligatory shot of Benzadrine inhalers being broken into coffee cups and imbibed, then Allen in undershorts masturbating in front of the typewriter and frantically speed writing. Even if they're only montages a couple of other scenes of electric amphetamine jazz cool are still better than average, especially a moment when the hip Negroes in the velvety black club freeze to show the hyper-intensity of the white boys' high as they drink in the sounds and a Billy Holiday-like singer croons. Both Jack Huston (of that famous movie family) as Kerouac and Ben Foster as Bill Burroughs do the requisite biopic celebrity schticks; Burroughs' voice is spot-on, though truth be told, nobody has ever done William Burroughs better than William Burroughs himself and nobody could be more caritcaturally hilarious than him doing his Doctor Ben Gay turns. Bill is first seen at a Greenwich Village party Carr leads Ginsberg to appropriately lying in a bathtub hooked up to a can of nitrous oxide.

Mostly this is about Lucien and Allen with the threat of Lucien's stalker-mentor, but other figures appear periodically to fill in the background, like Ginsberg's old fossil Columbia writing teacher Professor Stevens (John Cullum) and Keroouac's live-in girlfriend Edie (Elizabeth Olsen) whom he cheats on. Lu Carr is a major cock teaser: he teases Allen be implying he's going to see a "real writer" when he first goes to meet the big football player "Jack" who'd "already written a million words before he came here," and he mocks and teases his predator David, but also depends on him to write his papers for him. Who is in charge, David or Lu? Lu is in charge of everybody but not in charge of himself. He introduces Allen to Yeats and A Vision, a source of a name they cook up for themselves. Later Lu and Allen and Jack are sorely torn and Lu wants to escape David by joining the Merchant Marine with Jack; Allen is finding himself sexually and artistically . Lu is a catalyst that's also a will-o'-the-wisp. This is a frustrated love affair for Ginsberg, who gets some caresses and kisses in with Carr, but his full-on sexual beginning comes from a man he meets in a bar who looks from the back like Carr. This is intercut with Carr stabbing Kammerer, a gruesome event delivered in fractured images. It's a strange but essential way to end a story that for the main figures is mostly just beginning.

The director collaborated on the script with his Yale roommate the writer Austin Bunn.

Kill Your Darlings debuted at Sundance Jan. 2013 and opened limited 16 Oct.; following a LFF showing it opens in the UK 6 Nov.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.