Kill Your Darlings is the story of the murder that linked Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr, during the time they all knew each other at Columbia University. It’s also, to a small extent, about the birth of the beat poets as artists, although I found this aspect of the film quite unsatisfying. Indeed, there’s very little substance to this film in any area. Character development is superficial and a bit cartoonish, the artistic ideas bandied about are fun initially, but ultimately murky and uncompelling, the music is rather generic, and all the performances are a bit weak. After a bunch of noisy, flashy scenes with young artists declaring their desire to create something bold and new (without say what, exactly,) the film settles or devolves into a simplistic homosexual love triangle, the details of which are strangely divorced from the whole rest of the film.

I suppose Kill Your Darlings might be interesting to someone who grew up reading the beat poets, and thus had an emotional bond with them. But I can tell you as someone who knows nothing about them or their work this film did not make them seem interesting or compelling, beyond the inherent superficial likability of any collection of youthfully idealistic rebels. And the homosexual murder story was not nearly interesting enough to make up for the film’s lack of intellectual content.

I can’t really recommend Kill Your Darlings.