Daniel Radcliffe Nails Allen Ginsberg in 'Kill Your Darlings' Teaser

The teaser for Kill Your Darlings has arrived, and the headline writes itself: Daniel Radcliffe disappears into Allen Ginsberg — horn-rimmed, Jersey-accented, vibrating with undergraduate hunger — in John Krokidas' debut about the 1944 killing that catalyzed the Beat Generation.

The film dramatizes the true story most Beat hagiography skips: Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), the beautiful connector who introduced Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs at Columbia, and his killing of the older man who obsessively pursued him, David Kammerer. The case scattered the group and, the film argues, forged the ethos their books would canonize.

Krokidas shot on a shoestring with a murderers' row of young actors — DeHaan, Ben Foster as Burroughs, Jack Huston as Kerouac, Michael C. Hall as Kammerer — and Sony Pictures Classics has staked out an October release in the thick of awards season.

For the literary-minded, the pleasure is archaeological: watching the raw material of Howl and On the Road assemble itself in dorm rooms and dive bars. Radcliffe, post-Potter, keeps choosing the strangest possible next moves; on this evidence, keep letting him.