'Kill Your Darlings' trailer: 'An endless circle of living and dying'

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Published on September 4, 2013 06:44PM EDT

It’s the perfect combination of poetry and … murder?

A film festival favorite, Kill Your Darlings follows a young Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) as he first encounters William Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) in New York City in the 1940s and launches what would eventually become the Beat Generation, a group of post-World War II writers characterized by their overall rejection of standards, sexual experimentation, drug use, and more. Beat literature included pieces such as Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, all of which helped hook America into a new obsession with the culture. But Kill Your Darlings takes things back to an event that occurred before the “Beat Generation” term even existed.

The film tells a lesser-known, much darker story, revolving around an event that occurred in 1944, after Ginsberg met a man named Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). Well before Ginsberg wrote Howl, he befriended Carr in school. But when Carr murdered professor David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), Ginsberg was left with a lot of questions.

Kill Your Darlings presents a new chapter in the history of the Beat Generation, one of “obsession and murder.”

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Elizabeth Olsen also star.

Watch the trailer below:

Kill Your Darlings will have a limited release on Oct. 16.