Daniel Radcliffe in “Kill Your Darlings” Beat generation drama trailer (video)

 September 5, 2013 - 15:25 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Kill Your Darlings has debuted its first full trailer, Digital Spy said.

Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan star in John Krokidas's feature debut, a tale of the early days of the Beat generation.

Radcliffe plays a young Allen Ginsberg, who falls under the spell of the charismatic Lucien Carr (DeHaan).

While they begin by plotting literary revolution, their story reaches fever pitch with the infamous murder of David Kammerer (Michael C Hall).

Jack Huston stars as Jack Kerouac and Ben Foster as William Burroughs, with Elizabeth Olsen, David Cross and Jennifer Jason Leigh also among the cast.

“By building his portrait around a mysterious killing that tangentially involved the young Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in 1944, John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings succeeds more than most in capturing the first flickers of the literary movement without hipster self-consciousness.

More specifically, this invigoratingly textured jazz riff -- spliced with hallucinogenic interludes, introspective detours and moments of romantic reverie -- explores a formative period in Ginsberg’s life. He’s not quite the center of this story, but Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) provides its overriding point of view.

While Howl, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 2010 feature in which James Franco played the poet, was an audacious docu-narrative hybrid, it also was something of a stylistic cacophony. The film never quite solved the problem of how to make the genesis of poetry a participatory experience. Krokidas and co-screenwriter Austin Bunn are less interested in the output than the birth of the poet, at least where his first experience of love and disillusionment is concerned.

Radcliffe can be a slightly recessive screen actor, but his subdued quality works well here in a role that calls for him to be both a part of a burgeoning scene and to some degree a contemplative outsider looking in. While he fully conveys the excitement of a young rebel determined to break down the establishment walls, he also anchors the film with well-judged vulnerability.

In the flashiest role, the enormously talented DeHaan is a febrile, magnetic presence, making no mystery of why Ginsberg, Kammerer and Kerouac would be so drawn to fickle Carr. Huston and Foster handle their characters’ cultivated pre-beatnik mannerisms with aplomb, while Hall swings effectively between cool authority and obsessive neediness. And as the Columbia professor who asserts, “There can be no creation without imitation,” New York stage vet Cullum slyly draws a line between a rigid classicist and a man of sharp intellect with an eye for genuinely original talent.

Stephen Carter’s atmospheric period production design, costumer Christopher Peterson’s ’40s threads and cinematographer Reed Morano’s hopped-up shooting style make this an attractive visual package,” a review published in The Hollywood Reporter said.

Kill Your Darlings will receive a limited release in the U.S. on October 18. It will arrive in the UK on November 8.