Kill Your Darlings (2013)Movies

Daniel Radcliffe continues stretching as an actor to play legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg as a gay Columbia University freshman discovering his sexuality in John Krokidas’ “Kill Your Darlings.” And although a murder takes place, the film is less a “Who done it?” than a “They did it,” set in 1940s Manhattan.

It’s clear from the opening scene that Ginsberg’s pal Lucien Carr (the charismatic Dane DeHaan, who handily steals the movie from the erstwhile Harry Potter) is responsible for killing an older man, David Kammerer, creepily played by Michael C. Hall (of “Six Feet Under” and “Dexter”).

To find out why, the debuting Krokidas and his co-screenwriter, Austin Bunn, show how Jersey boy Ginsberg fell into the hedonistic...