Like buses, movies about the Beat poets seem to be coming along in twos, with news that Jesse Eisenberg will play Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, a dramatisation set in the early days of the Beat movement.
Unlike the Ginsberg biopic Howl, also in production, Kill Your Darling****s delves into altogether murkier territory, depicting the murder of David Kammerer in 1944. Kammerer, who had fallen in with Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and the Beat crowd, was found floating in the Hudson River, in a case that scandalised New York and remains controversial to this day.
Fittingly for a movie about young literary doyens, **Kill Your Darlings **is chock full of Hollywood's bright young things: alongside Eisenberg, soon to hit our screens as Adventureland's wide-eyed graduate, is Chris Evans as Kerouac and Ben Whislaw who plays Lucien Carr, the Columbia Uni student implicated in the murder.
Our hope is for something pitched between The Talented Mr. Ripley and a kind of poetry-based A-Team, but we'd take anything more gripping than 1990's lacklustre Beat, which covered some of the same ground and featured the unlikely casting of Kiefer Sutherland as William Burroughs.