It's only when Allen recites a poem - on a moonlit night, on a stolen boat - that Lucien is comprehensively struck by his genius, as are we. These young men, Krokidas seems to be saying, are treading a fine line between inspiration and tomfoolery. To create magic, he jerks off in front of his typewriter, or stupidly ties a noose around his neck to come a little closer to death. Desperate to hang onto Lucien's interest, Allen practically stumbles into his own talent. The Beat poets may have become the idols of literary hipsters everywhere, but Krokidas takes care to tuck their ingenuity and creativity into the recognisable rhythms of everyday life. The most intriguing thing about Kill Your Darlings is that it refuses to romanticise this budding intellectual movement. Slicing and dicing pages of old classics, the boys make their manifesto quite literal: they will not rely on or succumb to tradition their work will be conscribed by neither rhyme nor meter. You don't have to know the Beat poets or their work to recognise the fire burning in these young men. Allen yearns, Jack drinks, William sucks nitrous oxide into his lungs in a bathtub, and Lucien keeps them all spinning. Krokidas keeps this fascinating brew of hormones, hope and horror bubbling throughout, effectively nailing the champagne fizz of youth: a time when you could do ridiculous things, and remember them as romantic and revolutionary. Hall), a man hopelessly caught in Lucien's enthralling spell. As their lives intersect, their destinies intertwine, tangled up in the form of David Kammerer (Michael C. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston). Lucien brings together the aspiring artists who will soon come to change the literary world with their words: Allen, William S. He meets the electrifying Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), a rebel radiating so much charisma and ambition that it's easy to forget his lack of actual talent. Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) arrives at Columbia University keen to start a life away from the shadow of his famous dad, poet Louis Ginsberg (David Cross), and his mentally unstable mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). But John Krokidas' debut feature film, which takes as its subjects the American poets of the revolutionary Beat Generation, fits in so much more, as it explores a haunting search for life and legacy that teeters close to the edge of death. It would be easy to dismiss Kill Your Darlings as yet another entry in a tired genre: the tale of a poet who finds his voice through a heady cocktail of sex, drugs and college. Typically, coming-of-age stories unfold in a predictable fashion: kid tentatively ventures into the world beyond the one he knows, where he encounters people and things that will change him and his outlook on life forever.
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