![]() ![]() The concern here is not the fact itself that Kammerer died, but the motive for it. Kammerer might actually still be an obsessive nutso (such people are not confined to any one sexuality), but he might have lived. One could say that shame is the root of it all, and if these people all lived today, things quite probably would have turned out differently. And they all have very complicated, dysfunctional relationships with each other. The ideas, the inspirations, the influences on their writing - here, that all passes through just these three. Rounding out Carr and Ginsberg's group of friends are William Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), but they never directly impact the conflicts between Carr, Kammerer and Ginsberg. Only once he befriends Ginsberg does Carr start trying to break away from Kammerer completely, which only ratchets up Kammerer's obsession. Kammerer, working as a janitor at his school, writes all Carr's papers for him. Hall, doing tormented quite well as always) is the older man so obsessed with Carr that he might be called a stalker, except Carr blithely takes advantage of him. Probably he's gay, but haunted more by that fact than the others.ĭavid Kammerer (Michael C. Ginsberg, both Jewish and gay, gets pulled into Carr's charismatic and troublemaking orbit. Curiously, the central character is Ginsberg, played adequately by Daniel Radcliffe the accused, Lucien Carr, is played by the excellent Dane DeHaan ( Chronicle The Place Beyond the Pines). Although Kill Your Darlings is based on a true story, it's still a relatively conventional one: a group of friends get mixed up in a murder. Luckily, that doesn't matter all that much. Who in the twenty-first century can penetrate mid-twentieth century poetry anyway? I didn't always understand what the hell they were talking about. Some evidently smart people made a movie about them. Granted, these are all very smart people. Much of this movie, about a group of young writer friends who went on to become some of the most iconic American writers of the twentieth century, is cerebral to the point of going over the lay person's head. The script is pointed about it: asked about his mentally ill mother, Allen Ginsberg says, "It's complicated." Lucien Carr replies, "I love complicated." Later, the characters repeat the same lines, only reversed.įirst-time feature director (and co-writer) John Krokidas seems enamored with the complications. The story here is more complicated than that. This basically later evolved into the "gay panic" defense that was used for decades after. What person under 40 even realizes today that a so-called "honor killing" was considered a justifiable defense for homicide? As in, a heterosexual man can kill a man, say it was in self-defense after being propositioned, and all but get off free for it. ![]() Kill Your Darlings is a period piece that underscores how far we have come in the past seventy years when it comes to acceptance of homosexuality. ![]()
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