Kill Your Darlings (How Beatniks Are Made)

Postcard from the old days. College students in duffle coats, hanging out in Greenwich Village coffee houses, arguing about Yeats and Whitman, in a lather over jazz, experimenting with sex and dope, bursting with non-commercial creativity, crazy to revolutionize, doomed peach-fuzz romantics trying to one-up Arthur Rimbaud.

Kill Your Darlings narrowcasts us back to the young explorations of Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), fledgling holy man and tentative poetic conscience of howling modernity, during his studies at Columbia in 1944. The director, John Krokidas, and his co-writer Austin Bunn throw the era in our face in huge jangling chunks — gorgeous sound engineering — daring us to look at life the way the sensitive kid from New Jersey does. Ginsberg is on his way to becoming a Beat, maybe the first, and so we meet the most important of his proto-beatnik pals: William Burroughs (Ben Foster, in an immaculate impersonation), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), and a boyish chap named Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), Allen's campus roommate, who falls in love with him. Lucien has problems over and above getting drunk and abusing methamphetamines.

Actor Radcliffe continues his exit from the Harry Potter franchise by choosing another meaty part that has nothing to do with secret spells — junkies and queers, yes, but no flying dragons. This Ginsberg is complicated. He sees things others do not, like Harry. Holding up their side of the earth are Jennifer Jason Leigh as Ginsberg's disturbed mother Naomi, John Callum as the lit prof who provides the title advice, Elizabeth Olsen as Kerouac's girlfriend Edie, and, as the fulcrum of the piece, Michael C. Hall's David Kammerer, host of the late-late hate show. Kammerer and Ginsberg both love Lucien Carr. So does every sailor who hits New York. Something's gotta give. No wonder Ginsberg lit out for Benares and San Francisco. "Another lover hits the universe." The Beats just keep on coming.

I like the MAD Magazine parody of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, as a beatnik would do it.

Friends, Romans, hipsters,
Let me clue you in;
I come to put down Caesar, not to groove him.
The square kicks some cats are on stay with them;
The hip bits, like, go down under;
So let it lay with Caesar. The dude Brutus
Gave you the message Caesar had big eyes;
If that’s the sound, someone’s copping a plea,
And, like, old Caesar really set them straight.
Here, copacetic with Brutus and the studs,—
For Brutus is a real cool cat;
So are they all, all cool cats,—
Come I to make this gig at Caesar’s lay down.
He was my boy, the most and real gone to me;
But, like, Brutus pegs him as having big eyes;
And old Brutus is a real cool cat.
He copped a lot of swinging heads for home,
Which put us way out with that loot;
Does this give Caesar big eyes?
When the square cats bawled, Caesar flipped;
Big eyes should be made of more solid megillah;
Yet Brutus pegs him as having big eyes;
And Brutus is a real cool cat.
You all dug that bit at the Lupercal scene
Three times I bugged him with the King’s lid,
And three times he hung me up; was this big eyes?
Yet Brutus pegs him with big eyes;
And, sure, he is a real cool cat.
I don’t want to double-O what Brutus gummed,
But, like, I only dig what comes on straight
You all got a charge out of him once,
So how come you don’t cry the blues for him?
Man! You are real nowhere,
You don’t make it anymore. Don’t cut out on me;
My guts are in the pad there with Caesar,
And I gotta stop swinging till they round-trip.

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