Kill Your Darlings is a 2013 American biographical-drama-film directed by John Krokidas in his feature film directorial debut. The movie stars Daniel Radcliffe who was the most famous child actor in history, he was just a child: an only child, a poor sleeper, a nonstop talker, a picky eater… He was also disarmingly sweet. 

He took the screen test at the age of ten, for the first Harry Potter film. It looked like Daniel would never lose the tag of Harry Potter. However, thirteen years later, he is starring as one of Americas leaders of the counter culture and key figures of the beat generation… Mr Allen Ginsberg.  He does a good job too, proving has come a long way.

Kill your Darlings is focused on the Beat Generation of the 1950’s. But not the time that many people talk of… the time before Ginsberg wrote Howl, before William Burroughs penned Naked Lunch and before Jack Karouac went on the road.

 The story is about Ginsberg’s relationship with Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) when they were students at Columbia: Carr was the troubled young aesthete to whom Ginsberg was to dedicate the first edition of Howl, and who was to be involved in a grisly act of violence. Carr had much influence over the early beat generation poet in love, art and life.

The film follows young, talented Allen Ginsberg, a frustrated teen from Paterson, New Jersey, as he enters his freshman year at Columbia. There, he becomes captivated by Lucien Carr, a charismatic bon vivant who likes to get up on tables and recite Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer from memory at the top of his lungs. “Lu,” as he’s called, introduces Ginsberg to wealthy Harvard scion and nonstop drug-experimenter Burroughs.

The film takes turns of artistic freedom and pure loose excitement of life to disasterous events and a tragic death that became the catalyst for seismic changes within the young beat generation.

FNND is an unashamedly huge fan of American literature of that time and so cannot help but love ‘Kill your Darlings’ not only for its portrayal of one of the most important literary moments and figures but also for giving us a brief opportunity feel the moments like Howl and taste the  intoxicating freedom that it created.