***On Becoming Allen Ginsberg- Kill Your Darlings-A Film Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Sony Pictures, 2013

I am prepared, as a child of the generation of ’68, to pay due homage to, or at least look at, any book, film or play that even tangentially deals with my forbear heroes from the beat generation, you know mill town million word Jack Kerouac, mad monk sage of the new dispensation Allen Ginsberg, jaded drugstore- cowboy William S. Burroughs, street gunsel poet Gregory Corso, the father we never knew Neal Cassady and the usual suspects. Although that cultural movement was just a tad bit early for me to appreciate as a youth in the early 1960s (taking the faux-beat scene around Harvard Square coffee- houses and blessed midnight Hayes-Bickford eateries as the real deal) since then I have come to greatly appreciate what literary delights that crowd produced for us. Thus no one should be ashamed, in fact far from it, to go back to that period and mine any nuggets they can from those forbears given the vast cultural wasteland that confronts us these days. Those guys (and it was mainly guys) might have been madmen but they did it with style, freeform style not some studied pose. One wishes that the literati of the generation of '68 fifty years out could still generate such interest.

Those who put together this film under review, Kill Your Darlings, centered on some episodes in the life of one cosmic poet Allen Ginsberg have tried their hand at mining some nuggets from the formative period of his life, his college days, in the wartime 1940s in New York City years . Mostly they have succeeded in contrast to any earlier effort by others to do so for later period in Howl(from the title of his ground-breaking poem) and his sidekick role in last year’s frankly disappointing film adaptation of Kerouac’s On The Road.

Of course any effort to figure out what one Allen Ginsberg was about, or trying to be about, has to focus on his struggle to write poetry very different from his father’s formal stuff, to break loose from the poetic norms, his unsuccessful struggle to defend his mother against her demons, and as well his attempts to deal with his sexual orientation when unlike today the closet was the place of bitter choice for homosexuals, or the sexual different of any type. Add on drug experimentation and his friendship with one fellow mad monk Lucien Carr and the circle is complete. Well almost complete since that mad monk Carr was being pursued by an older man, an older man who wound up very dead one night. At Carr’s hand? Well that is the mystery, a mystery that drags Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs (whose druid-ness, if there is such a word, seemed always to be present when the going got weird) and half of the Village literati in its wake. Strange, strange indeed. But a well-acted portrayal by Radcliffe and DeHaan as the two headliners Ginsberg and Carr here. But read, read like crazy all the stuff the beats wrote, wrote when men (and a few women) wrote literature for keeps.