Set during the 1940s, Kill Your Darlings follows the Columbia University years of future Beat Generation icons Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster), Jack Kerouac (Boardwalk Empire's Jack Huston), and their friend, muse, and, in many ways, ringleader Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan).
Ginsberg and Carr, two young men with troubled home lives, become fast friends and eventually more, but the latter's relationship with a possessive older man, failed intellectual-turned-janitor David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), becomes the dark heart of this movie -- a relationship that ends in bitterness and bloodshed.
Kill Your Darlings makes these intellectual icons human and accessible rather than daunting and overly academic. Sure, they're pretentious, but they're also young, vulnerable and full of ambition and ideas so pretension comes with the territory. As interested as the film is in the ideas that formed the Beat movement, it's more a story about the personal freedom the Beat poets sought, specifically with sexuality at time when being gay meant being in the closet.
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