Dane DeHaan and
Daniel Radcliffe in
Kill YoUr Darlings
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CONT pORARY
Film revisits Allen Ginsberg's pivotal
freshman year at Columbia.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
W
hen Allen Ginsberg left home
for the first time, to attend
Columbia University, the
characteristics that formed his identity
— dutiful son, frustrated caretaker, intel-
lectual Jew, unacknowledged homosexual
and aspiring poet — collided with life-
changing force.
As depicted in filmmaker John
Krokidas' mesmerizing and propulsive
feature debut, Kill Your Darlings, the
catalyst was a worldly student named
Lucien Carr, who became Ginsberg's first
(albeit unrequited) love and introduced
the wide-eyed freshman to a circle that
included William Burroughs and Jack
Kerouac.
The film portrays an unformed, social-
ly awkward Ginsberg, movingly played by
Daniel Radcliffe, buffeted by awakened
hormones, literary inspiration, amphet-
amines, Jewish guilt and anti-Semitism.
"We didn't want contemporary audi-
ences to forget the way things were back
then," Krokidas said in a recent interview.
'And that includes the fact that a Jewish
student would have his religion and cul-
tural heritage brought up in conversation:'
During World War II, Krokidas notes,
there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the
U.S. and even at Columbia, where a quota
on Jewish students existed.
"Kill Your Darlings is a story about
an artist finding his voice, which Allen
Ginsberg includes as not only his sexual-
ity but his Judaism:' Krokidas declares.
"I felt it important to make sure that we
weren't whitewashing or ignoring that
[anti-Semitism] was definitely one of the
struggles that he came up against as a
young Jewish man in 1944:'
Krokidas was raised in a suburb of New
Haven, Ct., where "the Jews outnumbered
the non-Jews, and you knew how popu-
lar you were by how many bar and bat
mitzvahs you were invited to. So I never
knew, growing up, that Jews were con-
sidered a minority" His mother's mother
was Jewish, and so was his stepfather; his
younger half-brother was a bar mitzvah.
Like Ginsberg, Krokidas grew up
with an emotionally ill parent, and one
deduces — in conversation and from the
film — that this shared experience was
one of his main motivations for devoting
10 years to writing, developing and mak-
ing Kill Your Darlings.
`Allen Ginsberg at that time in his life,
when we did our research and looked at
the oral histories and ultimately got to
look at his adolescent journals, was an
emotional caretaker; Krokidas explains.
"He was the family member who took
care of his mother (played by Jennifer
Jason Leigh). Those of us with emotion-
ally ill parents who took care of them
know that that becomes somewhat a
theme for life. Look who he falls in love
with when he gets to school: an extremely
charismatic and seductive yet most likely
emotionally ill young man (Lucien Carr),
whom he starts taking care of
Kill Your Darlings excavates a forgot-
ten footnote to the poet's biography that
climaxes with obsession, betrayal and
murder. While the first year away at col-
lege is a period of exploration and growth
for most people, in Ginsberg's case it was
dramatic, traumatic and life-altering.
The filmmaker, who wrote the screen-
play with his college roommate and
best friend, Austin Bunn, confides that
Jesse Eisenberg originally signed on as
Ginsberg. But after The Social Network,
the actor decided not to play another
Jewish Ivy League college student.
Radcliffe, whose mother is Jewish, was
subsequently cast and embraced the role
with singular dedication, Krokidas says.
"The danger that I worried about is I've
seen when people tackle famous Jewish
characters, they overdo the accents and
it becomes a parody of the character:'
Krokidas says. "So Dan and I worked
really hard on listening to early Allen
Ginsberg recordings. We didn't want to
mimic who he'd later become. It's like a
bad wig. It does more harm than good:'
Krokidas was determined to avoid
the cliches of dusty biopics and to make
a visceral film that would connect with
younger audiences, whether they'd heard
of the Beats or not. Radcliffe's presence, as
much as Ginsberg's reputation, will pre-
sumably attract moviegoers receptive to
the film's overarching theme.
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Directed by Christopher Bremer
Featuring: a;DCAGWEI G5amOlial attl nberg,
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2012 Obie Award, Best New Play • 2012 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award
2012 Time Magazine's #1 Play or Musical
❑
Kill Your Darlings opens Friday,
Nov. 22, at the Landmark Main Art
Theatre in Royal Oak. (248) 542-
5198; landmarktheatres.com .
248.788.2900
JET is a professional, Actors Equity Association
theatre that performs in the Aaron DeRoy Theatre
in the JCC - Located on the corner of
Maple & Drake Roads in West Bloomfield
osenl bk.
www.JetTheatre.org
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November 21 • 2013
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