dvd of the week
John Krokidas and Austin Bunn’s wonderful film about the beginnings of the Beats, the phrase “kill your darling” is spoken by an English professor with the usual purpose – edit down your extravagant writing – but it also means a great deal more. One of the first scenes in the film is Lucien Carr (a slithering, incandescent Dane DeHaan) holding the dying body of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), who Carr had called his guardian angel and who had been stalking him for years and who Carr stabbed before sinking him into the Hudson River. The rest of the film is the story of what leads up to this moment, and it heavily centers on Alan Ginsberg’s (a wonderfully surprising Daniel Radcliffe) relationship with Carr, and with their friendships with Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (a brilliant Ben Foster). Krokidas and Bunn’s screenplay, based on Bunn’s story, does the Beats justice by featuring lyrical, kinetic and occasionally very funny dialogue and by not over-praising figures who have been lionized by readers for sixty years.
