After making a very impressive bow at Sundance at the start of the year, earning critical acclaim in spades, John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings is heading out to Toronto this month, looking for a repeat performance.
Sony Classics will then be releasing it in the US a few weeks later. And ahead of its appearance at TIFF next week, the studio have launched the first trailer online, via Yahoo Movies, to whet our appetites.
While he is attending Columbia University in 1944, the young Allen Ginsberg’s life is turned upside down when he sets eyes on Lucien Carr, an impossibly cool and boyishly handsome classmate. Carr opens Ginsberg up to a bohemian world and introduces him to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Repelled by rules and conformity in both life and literature, the four agree to tear down tradition and make something new, ultimately formulating the tenets of and giving birth to what became the Beat movement. On the outside, looking in, is David Kammerer, a man in his thirties desperately in love with Carr. When Kammerer is found dead, and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr are arrested in conjunction with the murder, the nascent artists’ lives change forever.
Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan take centre stage as Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, with Ben Foster, Jack Huston, Elizabeth Olsen, Michael C. Hall, David Cross, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick, and David Rasche starring alongside them.
Krokidas is making his directorial debut behind the camera, directing from a script he co-wrote with Austin Bunn. And if the early word out of Sundance is right, Krokidas is definitely going to be one to watch in the years to come.
Kill Your Darlings will kick off its limited release in the US on October 18th, before widening across the States in successive weeks. And its UK release date is set shortly after for 8th November. In the meantime, here’s the first official trailer. Enjoy.
