Gay Dead Poets Society

Movies: Kill Your Darlings

Kill Your Darlings REALLY wants to be Dead Poets Society. And it falls flat on its face. Taking place in the mid 1940's, Kill Your Darlings is about the early years of the Beat poets. Allen Ginsberg (played wonderfully by Daniel Radcliffe, who is one of the few bright spots in the movie), William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), and lesser-known Lucien Carr (Daniel DeHaan, who is the spitting image of a young Leonardo DiCaprio) are all at Columbia University together. Carr plays a Manic Pixie Dream Boy--a pretty, androgynous young man with a taste for rebellion who sucks people into his orbit--who takes Ginsberg under his wing. He invites him to wild parties down in the "queer" boroughs of New York, gets him into all kinds of drugs, and encourages him to destroy property in the quest for creating a new kind of art. Of course, Ginsberg falls in love with Carr.

Carr, meanwhile, has his own monkey on his back: David Kammerer (played by Dexter...I mean, Michael C. Hall). Kammerer was a former teacher and leader of a youth group Carr was in. The older man become obsessed with Carr, and basically stalked him all through the United States.

In Kill Your Darlings, Kammerer and Carr's relationship is portrayed ambiguously. Kammerer writes college papers for Carr, and while Carr obviously has no problem taking advantage of Kammerer's attentions, he seems weary and annoyed by the older man. Later in the movie, it becomes clear that Kammerer is obsessive and predatory. The movie doesn't really come out and say it, but it's pretty clear that the two men had a sexual relationship when Carr was underage. 



All this is leading up to a pretty inevitable conclusion (SPOILERS): After a fight one evening, Carr kills Kammerer. Again, the movie doesn't really take a stand on what actually happened. Did Carr attack Kammerer? Or did Kammerer want to die and ask Carr to kill him? I found this ambiguity misleading and disingenuous. Especially since Ginsberg at one point tries to defend Kammerer saying to Carr: "He loved you. And you loved him once." Um, sorry, but Kammerer was a stalker and a predator. The movie further demonizes Carr by showing (or rather, telling, in a paragraph of text at the end of the film) that Carr portrayed Kammerer as a predatory homosexual in court in an attempt to absolve himself of the murder (although he did spend time in prison). Such a thing was called an "honor slaying" back in the day--essentially, a straight man could kill a gay man and get away with it by saying the gay man tried to attack him.

So, Kill Your Darlings positions itself on the side of Kammerer. It suggests that Carr was a hypocritical and mentally unstable tease who led Kammerer on. Ugh. Although Carr certainly wasn't an angel, and perhaps if all of this took place in a different time, Kammerer's death could have been avoided, the fact remains that Kammerer was a stalker who preyed upon the much younger Carr.

The other plot of Kill Your Darlings is about the beginnings of the Beat movement. The movie fails here, as well. It tries to show the hijinks of Ginsberg, Carr, Kerouac, and Burroughs in a romantic, rebellious light, but the young men just come off as annoying, drugged out, immature little brats. There's one scene where they break into the university library at night and switch out the bibles housed on display in a glass case with "naughty" books like Lady Chatterley's Lover  and Ulysses. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about some college students in the mid 20th century reading some D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and discovering sex and all that--but the scene is utterly silly and ridiculous.

Daniel Radcliffe is the saving grace of Kill Your Darlings, playing an introverted and nerdy Ginsberg who is coming to terms with being gay in a society where being gay meant (as we see in the movie), you can basically be murdered and the murderer can get away with it. Radcliffe has been pretty fearless in his choice of roles post-Harry Potter, and Kill Your Darlings is no exception. Watching Ginsberg, seemingly the only kind and gentle person in this film, come of age and discover not just his sexuality, but his literary voice, is the only interesting thing in this overcooked melodrama.

3 out of 5 stars