Aside from the positive buzz Kill Your Darlings has received at the Sundance Film Festival, most of the hoopla has been about Daniel Radcliffe and whether or not he would be able to shed his Harry Potter image to pull off sexualized beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
So far we’ve only had his slightly different Harry Potter look to obsess over, but now a trailer from Kill Your Darlings has been released and we’re getting a little closer in seeing just how Radcliffe does in the beat generation.
Kill Your Darlings , which is John Krokidas’ first feature film, follows Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Car and their friendships with one another.
The synopsis out of Sundance is as follows :
“While he is attending Columbia University in 1944, the young Allen Ginsberg’s life is turned upside down when he sets eyes on Lucien Carr, an impossibly cool and boyishly handsome classmate. Carr opens Ginsberg up to a bohemian world and introduces him to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
“Repelled by rules and conformity in both life and literature, the four agree to tear down tradition and make something new, ultimately formulating the tenets of and giving birth to what became the Beat movement. On the outside, looking in, is David Kammerer, a man in his thirties desperately in love with Carr. When Kammerer is found dead, and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr are arrested in conjunction with the murder, the nascent artists’ lives change forever.”
The teaser trailer suggests the film will capture the jazzy, fast paced, stream of conscious vibe that last year’s On The Road exhibited. Although most of the latter film covered the friendship between the two leads in the novel written by Jack Kerouac, a version of Allen Ginsberg through the eyes of Kerouac, was also included.
Does Daniel Radcliffe fit the bill?