Kill Your Darlings

Film Title:
Kill Your Darlings

Director:
John Krokidas
Writer:
Austin Bunn,
John Krokidas

Starring:
Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan

Production Company: Killer Films, Benaroya Pictures
Release Date: December 6th 2013 (UK)

As a biography of the great poets of the 1940s, Krokidas' debut full-length picture achieved a reasonably small profit of $53,452 on its opening weekend and has seemingly remained a middling movie for viewers (the average rating being 6.5 on IMDb and 6.6 on RottenTomatoes). But for a lover of the classic education vs. the troublemaker scenario, Kill Your Darlings was just different enough to advance into my favourite indie films.

With excellent performances from the majority of actors, watch as Radcliffe's inquisitive if naive Alan Ginsberg loses all sense of the value of education, respectability and personal morality as he throws it away for DeHaan's mischievous and troubled dream-boy in a world of dangerous pleasure - to see it predictably come crashing down around them. With the signature shaky camera of the independent industry and some genuinely beautiful cinematography cut together with sequences of Ginsberg rewinding everything you've already seen on screen and furiously typing, there's something brilliantly refreshing with bringing the old injustices of homophobia in both social standing and within the law to an audience.

There's something reminiscent of Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013) with its outspoken and deliberately articulate characters with the ominous underlying high life, and the rite-of-passage tone from Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). While this tale of absolute love turning into absolute hate might not overexcite wider audiences, there's definitely quality hidden between the pages of Krokidas' film, unquestionably led by the chemistry and performance of Radcliffe and DeHaan.

Watch the trailer for Kill Your Darlings on YouTube.