With awards season in full swing and the Toronto Film Festival just around the corner, clips from smart films looking to score some attention are arriving online. Among them is Kill Your Darlings, the fact-based tale of friendship, literature, love and death among the embryonic Beat Generation in 1944. Check it out below, courtesy of The Playlist.
Featuring a well-picked cast that pushes Daniel Radcliffe (Allen Ginsberg), Dane DeHaan (Lucien Carr), Ben Foster (William Burroughs) and Jack Huston (Jack Kerouac) to the fore, Kill Your Darlings tracks how their lives intertwined and the tragic shadow that fell over them all.
While he is attending Columbia University in 1944, the young Allen Ginsberg’s life is turned upside down when he sets eyes on Lucien Carr, an impossibly cool and boyishly handsome classmate. Carr introduces Ginsberg to a bohemian world and introduces him to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
Repelled by rules and conformity in both life and literature, the four agree to tear down tradition and make something new, ultimately formulating the tenets of and giving birth to what became the Beat movement. On the outside looking in is David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), a man in his thirties desperately in love with Carr. When Kammerer is found dead, and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr are arrested in conjunction with the murder, the nascent artists’ lives change forever.
The film has already caused a minor storm at Venice, though that's mostly thanks to Radcliffe’s fans trying to get a glimpse of the man. Kill Your Darlings will arrive over here on November 8.