Stylish but barely mediocre overall

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The acting was amazingly good. The story kept me interested and the characters were lovable.

I watched this movie a little while ago purely because Daniel Radcliffe is in it and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was actually a fantastic movie. Daniel portrays Allen so well and I think they couldn't have cast a better actor for the role. The character Lucien was also amazing. Dane did wonderfully in this movie. I loved him in Lawless but I definitely like him more here. This movie instantly became one of my favourite movies and I plan to watch it multiple times. Truly amazing film. I highly recommend it. If you like any movie about poets, you will like it. If you like modern movies set in older decades, you will like it. I wish everyone would go out and buy this movie. I don't think it got enough credit for how wonderful it truly is. If you have not seen this yet, please do yourself a favor and watch it.

William Burroughs is the most boring person who ever lived. Lucien Carr and Jack Kerouac are close behind. Allen Ginsberg is interesting for two reasons.First, he was a surprisingly ordinary, unremarkable, and unpretentious person, as open and honest and honorable as he knew how to be; not a great poet or a great anything else, but great at being himself. Second, Daniel Radcliffe plays him in this movie. Radcliffe is amazing.I was never a Potter fan, but I saw some of the movies. Radcliffe made no impression on me at all. But he's made some interesting choices since that ended, and I wanted to see what he's like outside of that tedious Potter world. So Radcliffe is the reason I watched this, but I immediately forgot who he was. He thoroughly and convincingly becomes the Ginsberg character in this movie, and he makes that character far more interesting and complex than the real Ginsberg was.Every second he's on screen is marvelous because of him and only because of him. Nothing else about this movie is worth watching. Performers I've liked previously (Foster, Hall, DeHaan) are flat and dumb here. Only Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Cross, as Ginsberg's parents, are halfway believable and seem almost like real people. All the rest are just annoying posers.For this story to work (I could care less that it's true) Carr MUST be a charismatic character, and he's not charismatic at all in this movie. He's just a jerk. And he's ugly. That anybody would have looked at him twice or paid attention to a word he said is completely unbelievable - except Burroughs, who was a spoiled, self-obsessed moron and even more obnoxious than Carr himself.So I love Allen Ginsberg because he was so extraordinarily ordinary; and I love Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg in this movie, but that's all I love about it.

i just read burroughs' and kerouac's novel "and the hippos where boiled in their tanks" and i was so excited to see, that there was a movie based on the same story...let's be brief: the book was so much fun, which the movie was not, it was like a completely different story, over-dramatic and above all so much Hollywood-style, i.e. not even depicting the fun in drugs and useless drinking for instance (which was essential in the beat generations and so much fun in the novel), that's highly insulting for ginsberg, kerouac and burroughs....so much more fun reading the novel, forget about this movie! (except for the amazing cast: radcliffe, de haan (reminds me of young di caprio) and houston)