He’s sensitive and increasingly fearless on both fronts. Here, Radcliffe not only makes for a relatable romantic hero, but also a credible literary one. Too often, films about artists aren’t able to capture the creative process. Krokidas and Bunn do a great job of portraying a world where literature is both sexy and dangerous. To a much greater degree, it’s the story of Ginsberg’s coming of age, both as a gay man and a writer. The film is hardly a murder mystery anyway. “Kill Your Darlings” clearly doesn’t like Carr, though it stops just short of calling him a murderous, psychopathic liar. Whether he’s also a cold-blooded murderer is somewhat hedged, albeit just a little. As depicted by first-time feature director John Krokidas, who wrote the script with journalist-turned-screenwriter Austin Bunn, Carr is a narcissistic master of psychological and emotional manipulation, allowing Ginsberg, and perhaps Kammerer, to fall in love with him - nay, encouraging it - without requital. The film shows the two young men exchanging a single, brief kiss, but it also shows Carr plagiarizing - soliciting and accepting term papers from both Kammerer and Ginsberg as his own course work. From the movie, it’s even less apparent whether Carr - who served 18 months for manslaughter, and who went on to marry, fathering three children (including novelist Caleb Carr) - ever reciprocated Ginsberg’s puppyish lust. Though Carr never denied the act - in fact, he turned himself in - it’s not entirely clear if the killing was an act of self-defense against a homosexual stalker, as Carr, who died in 2005, claimed, or something more sinister. Hall of “ Dexter”), an older admirer who had known Carr since childhood. It centers on a killing that we glimpse at the film’s opening: Carr’s 1944 fatal stabbing of David Kammerer (Michael C. Though based on fact, the film is awash in delicious and difficult ambiguities. “I l ove complicated,” Carr says in reply, with a purr halfway between seduction and a threat. The person that the line is spoken to is Ginsberg’s schoolmate, Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), a dashing ne’er-do-well and fellow aspiring writer who quickly becomes Ginsberg’s crush and tour guide to the literarily and sexually transgressive world of 1940s Manhattan, where the film is set. It’s almost the movie’s signature.Īs first uttered by Daniel Radcliffe - playing a 19-year-old Allen Ginsberg, when the poet was still finding his footing at Columbia University and just establishing friendships with the writers who would become known as the Beat Generation - it’s a reference to Ginsberg’s mentally ill mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who was in and out of sanitariums during the poet’s youth. The phrase “it’s complicated” appears more than once in “ Kill Your Darlings,” having nothing to do with Facebook relationship-status updates.
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