Good movie but grossly overrated

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Despite the great cast such as Daniel Radcliffe, Elizabeth Olsen, Dane Dehaan and more 'Kill Your Darlings' is truly the boring film you should probably not waste your money upon since nothing was really happening for the biggest majority of it but also the perfomances and the characters as a whole weren't anything special either and the actors deserved better cause their really good and quite talented. (0/10)

This could have been a fantastic movie in the hands of someone like Cronenberg, Lynch or another with similar visual courage. Alas what we get, is this bland tale of excess in the literary department of a college in NY during WW II . Why and how these guys actually birthed a movement is very hard to see. Acting and the depiction of the time and place is very good (but whoever thought that, suddenly inserting contemporary rock music in an otherwise completely conventional period film is a good idea, is really a moron of epic proportions).Luckily it seems there are plenty of material to make some interesting films from the youths of both Burroughs and Kerouac so lets hope somebody with a more daring visual vision will get to that.

KILL YOUR DARLINGS isn't just one bad movie, it's five bad movies! There are so many stories it does not tell, so many themes it cannot explore, so much overall phoniness and shallow ignorance of life, the universe, and everything.It's not a moving coming-of-age story. Nor a thoughtful analysis of Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Nor an evocative film about the World War II era. Nor a chilling crime drama, even though the climax involves a brutal stabbing. Nor a stark, uncompromising look at the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, even though every single character is presented as some kind of addict. Nor an honest and candid exploration of the social pressures of college life then or now. There were at least five or six good movies you could have made with this material, and instead they made this foul sewage. As I watched this movie, I kept wondering if I was being unfair. I mean, given how vile all the characters are, and how ugly and sad the ending is, could anyone have done a better job? But then I thought of THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, based on the life of Jim Carroll, starring Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio. Ugly scenes of drug abuse? Brutally real violence? The emptiness of higher education stripped bare? Homosexuality right in your face? It's all there, but in THE BASKETBALL DIARIES the stakes are much higher. These people really matter. Even the poetry sounds better!KILL YOUR DARLINGS could have been a good movie. But it wasn't. And by the way, the "Beat" movement was not a club for gay men. Plenty of gay men hated the Beats. And plenty of Beats hated gay men. There was no love lost between Truman Capote and Jack Kerouac. In fact, Truman Capote famously said of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, "that's not writing, that's typing." It's movies like this that give teenage homosexual murderers a bad name.

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)