But the headlines, rather than focus on that reception, blared the news about Radcliffe’s explicit sex scene: “ Sundance Stunned By Radcliffe’s Gay-Sex Scenes,” “ Daniel Radcliffe at Sundance: Actor’s Sex Scenes Shock Audiences,” “ Daniel Radcliffe Love Scene in ‘Kill Your Darlings’ Has Fans Excited After Sundance Premiere.” The film premiered to rapturous reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January, with the highest accolades reserved for Radcliffe’s transformative performance as Ginsberg. Not that you’d know that if you paid any attention to the coverage of the film. While Ginsberg’s fascination with Carr provides Kill Your Darlings with its vivacious emotional throughline and his decision to lose his virginity is essential to the film’s climax, neither thing, really, is what the movie is actually-you know- about: how the perils of passion found three of the Beat Generation’s most talented writers embroiled in a murder investigation. Radcliffe, showing off impressive range in full bloom as a talented adult actor, plays famed poet Allen Ginsberg in his college years at Columbia University in 1944, where he develops his prodigious writing talents-and falls in love with gregarious classmate Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan).
