Daniel Radcliffe returns to the big screen later this year with his latest attempt to break away from the typecast of his Harry Potter roll in John Krokidas’ directorial debut, Kill Your Darlings. Playing beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, it’s another significant sidestep away from his wizarding childhood, which has also seen him take on The Woman in Black, get it on with horses in Equus (we’re pretty sure that’s what the play was about anyway) and trying out an Irish accent in The Cripple of Inishmaan.
The film is set around the coming together of beat generation icons, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs who met in New York while Ginsberg was studying at Columbia University. Forming a merry band they joined forces under the umbrella of fellow friend, Lucien Carr, who was a key part of the formation of the beat movement.
However, it’s not just the coming together of free thinking beats that the film holds at its centre, as it also focuses on the darker elements of the group’s early years. As well as their trawl of the nightlife and undercurrents of Chelsea and Greenwich Village, the real singe on the early beat sheen is the murder of Carr’s stalker, David Kammerer, by him in Riverside Park in 1944.
It’s a pretty crazy plot and it will add a little to Radcliffe’s slow pull away from his Hogwarts roots, but for debutant director and co-writer, John Krokidas, with Austin Bunn, there’s much more riding on the film than just adolescent remolding. With such an infamous set of events at its core and the much loved beats in the spotlight of controversy the question is whether or not he’ll be able to find enough of an audience for Kill Your Darlings. There’s a lot of shade to the goings on of the time, so whatever is created will be a bit of a stab in the dark at times, which could alienate as it tries to fascinate, shock and entertain.
Alongside Radcliffe, the film has also cast Jack Houston (Boardwalk Empire) as Jack Kerouac, Ben Foster (X-Men: Last Stand) as William S. Boroughs, Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines) as Lucien Carr and Michael C. Hall (Dexter) as David Kammerer. There’s also Elizabeth Olsen as Edie Parker, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time, and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Greenberg) plays Allen’s mother Naomi Ginsberg.
Check out the trailer below to get a taste of what the film is about. It premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival earlier in the year, as well as getting a showing at the recent Toronto Film Festival, but its full UK release date is slightly up for debate. It’ll be out in the States in October at a number of cinemas and while IMDB has it down for a UK release of the 6th December 2013, we’re not 100%, so we’ll be updating once we get a little closer to time.
