"Kill Your Darlings," Directed By John Krokidas

"Kill Your Darlings," the directorial debut of John Krokidas, is both a coming-of-age story of Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) as he developed into a poet at Columbia University and a true tale of a murder on the part of one of his peers. At Columbia, Ginsberg meets Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster); the trio would eventually achieve renown as Beat literary figures. Ginsberg also meets Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), troubled and charismatic, who becomes a muse–but not a fellow writer–as he urges his friends to overturn convention in their writing and their lives. Carr has been stalked for years by Dave Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), an older teacher. As tension between the two reached a climax, Carr stabbed Kammerer to death in Riverside Park, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in 1944–an event that has legal ramifications for Kerouac and moral ones for Ginsberg. Carr, the muse, literally gave this group of artistic rebels an outlaw aura as depicted in this compelling film.

Written in memory of Hal Goldman (1954-2010), Beat scholar, blues brother.
"Strange now to think of you, gone...
While I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village." - Allen Ginsberg, "Kaddish