Daniel Radcliffe stretches to play legendary beat poet Allen Ginsburg as a Columbia University freshman discovering his gay sexuality in John Krokidas’ “Kill Your Darlings,” which is less a “who done it?” and more of a “they did it” set in the 1940s.
It’s clear from the opening scene that Ginsburg’s pal Lucien Carr (the charismatic Dane DeHaan, who handily steals the movie from the erstwhile Harry Potter) is responsible for the death of a slightly older man, David Kammerer, played by Michael C. Hall (of “Six Feet Under” and “Dexter”).
To find out why, we follow how Jersey boy Ginsburg fell into the hedonistic company of fellow Beat legends Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster).
Kammerer is a former college teacher and ex-friend of Burroughs obsessed with Carr, who he has followed and seduced on a couple of previous college campuses. Carr becomes close friends with Ginsburg, and they participate in various pranks and daring behavior for the era.
The excellently acted — Elizabeth Olsen plays Kerouac’s wife — “Kill Your Darlings” is a consistently interesting origin story with excellent period detail. It’s not a bore like “On the Road,” last year’s adaptation of the Kerouac novel that presented fictionalized versions of some of the same characters.
The film, which showed Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival, will be released on Oct. 16 in the United States.