Kill Your Darlings ***

"Kill Your Darlings" offers an intriguing blend of biopic, coming of age/sexual awakening story, literary history, obsession, and murder mystery, all based on actual events when those who were to be the leading lights of the beat generation, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, were in New York in the forties.

The story follow Allen Ginsberg, son of a minor poet himself, as he matriculates at Columbia and meets the charismatic and seductive Lucien Carr. Carr introduces Ginsberg to a world of literary rebels, jazz, drugs, and dark secrets. Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) finds yet another role to inhabit and stretch into as the young Ginsberg. The evocation of the forties and the excitement and iconoclasm of the group are palpable, and the importance of words in life, love, and death are searingly portrayed. Dane DeHaan as Carr is fantastic, and Michael C. Hall as his friend and admirer is an inspired bit of casting.

"Kill Your Darlings" had a short run, but it's well worth hunting down to get a flavor of Ginsberg's milieu and the people and forces that shaped him, as well as to enjoy a fine movie.