Kill Your Darlings

The wife found this randomly scrolling one day and mentioned it to me. What drew her to it was Daniel Radcliffe. His post-HP roles have been nothing short of captivating, going from indie-tier horror movies like Horns to wild action movies like Guns Akimbo. He has taken a similar path to Elijah Wood post-major franchise, picking projects based on personal interest rather than box office success or possibility of industry awards. He acts for the love of it. Seeing him tackle legendary beat poet Allen Ginsberg, his college interactions with other writers of the movement, and the murder that tied them together while breaking them apart, sounded fascinating. Unfortunately, what sounds good on paper doesn't necessarily bear out in practice,and Kill Your Darlings is a painful example of that, Stories competing for time and somehow still being underbaked, characters lacking definition, and a dependence on knowing real-life facts to hold up a rickety narrative. We should start at the beginning, even though the movie does. Yes, that's right, it's time for a visit from one of my least favorite writing crutches, the in media res opening! Used by countless books and movies, and not once have I seen it have a positive effect on the story. At best, it's pointless "foreshadowing", and you can feel the wacky "you might be wondering how I got in this mess" narration itching in the back of your head. But Kill Your Darlings is actually done dirty by its opening, because it flashes forward to events that don't happen until the last twenty minutes (that being the murder of Lucien Carr's former lover), and the events that happen before it feel only occasionally and tangentially connected. Does Kill Your Darlings want to tell the story of the beginnings of the Beat Generation, or does it want to tell about the murder that split these writers apart? Well, both, but it does neither well, and the opening leads you to believe one will be the focus, when it's really the other. Since we're harping on lazy literary devices used by hacks as shortcuts, the montage that kicks off the final act is hilariously bad, as it blends and merges both Ginsberg's first homosexual encounter, Carr killing David Kammerer in the park, which is a weird juxtaposition, and then tosses in William Burroughs trying heroin, and Jack Kerouac being there, doing something I can't remember. "Jack Kerouac being there" is pretty much the summation of his character, too, and indicative of how this movie treats all its characters. You'd think the author of On The Road would have slightly more of a role than being the group's second plus-one, but nope. I mean, we do see him fight with his live-in girlfriend, but if that counts as character development, then the ingredients list on a can of Mountain Dew counts as song lyrics. Burroughs' entire thing here is "does drugs, talks in monotone". You'd think the two mains would get it better, but no. Carr is your standard contrarianism-as-a-religion mid-classman. You've seen Carr before; he's Patch Adams, Hoov from Animal House, Droz from PCU, with a little bit of John Keating from Dead Poets Society. Ginsberg is every starry-eyed freshman looking to find himself in college, who gets sucked into the rabble-rouser's whirlwind of chaos and disruption. We keep hearing how these men are fantastic writers and bold revolutionaries, but instead of showing you, it wants you to fill in the blanks with their post-college reputations. It is not just dependent on you knowing their work, it is borderline life-support for this movie to function. And what's a group of counter-culture agitators in college without stuffy intellectuals who scoff at breaking from tradition? I particularly loved the movie tripping over its own feet when, in a scene in class, Ginsberg challenges the professor's assertion about rhyme and meter in poetry by listing a renowned poet who did not conform to standard format. The movie actually has to have the professor scoff at Yeats. Yeah, okay, movie, your hipster is showing. This is then later betrayed in a scene at the very end, which makes the professor's dismissal of Yeats all the more confounding from a narrative standpoint. I'm sure there were some stuffed shirts back in the day that turned up their nose at breaking with some traditions, but a college-level professor in poetry didn't get there without knowing it is a vast ocean of styles. He isn't going to demand all poetry be submitted in Iambic pentameter out of principle. But because the writers of this movie couldn't see past their second-rate Dead Poets Society-meets-Animal House ripoff, they forced the first 3/4's of this movie to happen at the expense of their own logic. It was one mention of ivory towers or the bourgeois of hitting us vs. them college movie bingo. Speaking of this movie's bifurcation of story, let's talk about the two stories going on here. For the vast majority of this movie, Kill Your Darlings wants to be about the beginnings of the Beat Generation. I have no idea how accurate it is to reality, but to see how Kill Your Darlings portrays it, it feels more like the beginnings of a small terrorist organization, with writing manifestos and plotting raids on the school library. When Kerouac is brought in mid-movie (and I do mean in the middle, so, good job there, movie) and touted up as having "written a million words before Columbia", it feels like something might shift or explode. Nope, he's just a brash athlete-turned-writer, and we never see either of these aspects come into the story. We sure do spend a lot of time in bars and dorm rooms talking about the revolution, whatever the revolution is, but all of this is hand-waived away. They don't like poet Ogden Nash. Okay, why? What do they hope to accomplish with their spitting in the face of tradition? In fact, what tradition are they spitting in the face of? What are their goals? Did I need to do readings for this movie? This feels like a broken AI's summary of their collective Wikipedia pages. Along the way, there's tension with Carr and Kammerer (played by Michael C. Hall), but Kammerer disappears for long portions of the movie, and when he's there, Carr is agitated. The movie hints at things, but waits until late in the movie to spell it out, expecting the audience to be okay with some retroactive filling in of the blanks. This isn't a Hercule Poirot mystery. We see who killed and who died in the stupid in media res opening. Kill Your Darlings thinks its laying the groundwork by showing how these writers came together, but it rarely spends time building up the bubbling tension between Carr and Kammerer so that the explosion of violence feels earned. How does this impact the group? Wouldn't know, Kill Your Darlings couldn't care less to show you. We see Burroughs pack his bags, but we don't know why. Kerouac disappears entirely. And aside from a jailhouse visit argument, what information we get about it and the aftermath is from some text after the movie ends. It is astounding what this movie puts work into and where it gets lazy. It's never the right thing Kill Your Darlings is as confident of itself as it is as incapable of doing its topic or its characters any justice. Every character is a superficial sketch, which an insult when these are supposed to be real people. The movie sells itself as one narrative, swaps out another, and spends little time building to the one it sold you on to begin with, but also reduces the tale it tells to a set of cliches and highlights. There is a smugness about Kill Your Darlings. Not from the performers, but from the material and the script. It reeks of the same meaningless fight-the-system mentality as its hoary script, but it's hard to take this seriously as some small-scale, indie drama when you've got Daniel Radcliffe and Michael C. Hall in it. Its credibility is presumed because it's small and intimate, not earned because it actually put in the work. It's like going to the most expensive designer in town and getting them to make you an outfit inspired by clothing found at a thrift store. It reeks of assumed excellence. Kill Your Darlings wants to coast on the names of its subject matter and LGBTQ representation, without actually making a meaningful movie. If the choice was telling the story this way or not telling it at all, I'm sure all four men would've chosen silence.