Reviews in Brief: John Krokidas' "Kill Your Darlings"

This is really first impressions, and I doubt that I'll see it again -- I just didn't find it that interesting.

If you don't know, this is about Allen Ginsberg's (Daniel Radcliffe) years at Columbia University, where he falls in with Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), a dissolute (and fairly pretentious) young man. The core of the film, supposedly, is a murder: Carr kills his -- one hardly knows what to call him -- lover? Pursuer? -- David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall). It's somewhat up in the air as to whether Carr actually murdered Kammerer or was acting in self-defense, as he contends. Along the way, Ginsberg meets William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston).

Formally, the film does have a narrative line, which doesn't really go anywhere, broken by flashbacks and broken sequences of action in the now. Even the famous "gay sex scene"* is broken by other vignettes, and sequences of Ginsberg writing (at one point, under the influence of drugs) are fragmentary. This is a technique that can work beautifully in terms of filling in backstory and developing character, but I didn't get that here.

One problem may be the characters themselves. None of them are really sympathetic, even Ginsberg, who seems for the most part to be along for the ride: he enters university as a blank slate, falls in with Carr, and it's downhill from there. Carr is, ultimately, a spoiled brat, a sociopath in the making (actually, pretty much finished), Burroughs is a self-centered snot who hates being rich, Kerouac is pretty much a cardboard cut-out, and Kammerer is just a weak personality. Those characterizations, at least, are beautifully realized.

All of that contributes to a distanced quality to the film. The characters are revealed more than they develop, with the exception of Radcliffe's Ginsberg: by the end of the film, we can see that he's poised to become the voice of the Beat generation, but we're not sure how he got there.

I will hand director John Krokidas this: I've been thinking about this movie for two days. But when it comes right down to it, I didn't really care. None of these characters are people I want to know better, and there are huge sections of the film that are just plain dull. It's not tight, and it's not really what I'd call focused.

* About that sex scene: Radcliffe gave at least one interview in which he talked about filming that scene, and how Krokidas coached him through it, with special emphasis on how much it hurt. You didn't really see that in the action that wound up on the screen -- Radcliffe/Ginsberg was just taking it in, as far as we could tell, and his reaction was muted, to put it mildly. What should have been a moment of realization for Ginsberg was just another moment of "Oh, well, that was interesting." No pleasure, no pain, not much of anything. And that's pretty much my reaction to the whole film.