Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blistering performances.

(61%) A decent stab at bringing poetry to the sliver screen in this part animated snippet of Allen Ginsberg's life during a public obscenity trail around the release of his most noteworthy work. The runtime is pretty brief as it allows the poetry to do a fair amount of the talking with Ginsberg's life playing almost second fiddle between the court hearings. James Franco does a fair job in a role that mostly requires him to recite poems to quite mesmerising looking music video style short films that I thought worked perfectly well. The fact that a series of poems needed to be brought to a court of law to decide whether or not to ban them from public circulation in a so-called free country to me is as utterly laughable as it is annoyingly true. And marks the fact that rich and powerful prudes even today still seem to have a say on things that don't concern their tiny, weak, and largely closed minds.

I had heard that Daniel Radcliffe was going to play young gay poet Allen Ginsberg in his next film Kill Your Darlings, and when I found out that this film was about him, and his most celebrated but also controversial poem, I was intrigued to see what it would be like. Basically, set in 1957, San Francisco, the film examines the poem "Howl" being the focus of an obscenity trial, for it's frequent use of graphic language and references to homosexual, we also see the poem writer Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) interviewed, he was not afraid to admit his homosexuality, and his thoughts behind it, and throughout he reads extracts of the poem with animation illustrating the words. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers) as the publisher of the poem was the man on trial more than Ginsberg himself, prosecuting attorney Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn) wants to justification as to why the poem was aloud to be published, and gets opinions literary experts, including literary critic/book editor Luther Nichols (Alessandro Nivola) and Professor David Kirk (Jeff Daniels), to defend it's credibility. In society "Howl" has become a literary revolution, part of the San Francisco Renaissance and a cultural phenomenon, and throughout the film passages from the poem accompanied by surreal animation of all sorts, computer animated and hand drawn to interpret, this only adds to the non-linear film construction, mixing 1940's and 1950's historical fact and a variety of other cinematic techniques. Of course young Ginsberg is seen throughout the film as well, mostly in black and white during his early interviews about his poetry and other literary work, doing public readings, including from "Howl", and his personal experiences of homosexuality and some struggles, that gave him the confidence to express himself, Ginsberg was not afraid to write whatever he wanted and created a literary masterpiece. Also starring Jon Hamm as Jake Ehrlich, Bob Balaban as Judge Clayton Horn, Mary-Louise Parker as Gail Potter, Treat Williams as Mark Schorer, Todd Rotondi as Jack Kerouac and Jon Prescott as Neal Cassady. I can see what the critics mean that the often laughable animation by street artist Eric Drooker maybe overshadows the sequences of Ginsberg and the courtroom scenes, but I don't think this is the case, it is certainly experimental the editing, but you definitely appreciate the subtle but interesting performance by Franco as young Ginsberg, I don't think this is the type of film I would see more than once, but it was an interesting drama based on a true story. Worth watching, at least once!

I'm surprised that this film worked as well as it did, and that it has been received as well as it has here. I read Howl about 5 years after Ginsberg wrote it, when I was in high school, and, like it or not, it became part of my thinking in the fifty years since then. Still in high school, I could quote passages from the poem at my friends, who would follow up with the next passage, etc. Boooring. But if you had told me that a film would be made about it, with a script constructed of trial transcripts and interviews in the public record, alternating with a recreation of Ginsberg's first public (paying-public; there was ONE previous reading of the full poem) reading of the poem, I wouldn't have expected much. And I would have been wrong. It's well-done and well-acted, and no excuses are made for anything about Ginsberg or his work. I was dismayed at first to see the poem interpreted into animation, but the filmmakers were savvy enough to produce the animation in the style of the times, i.e., 1955, when Disney's Fantasia was still the state of the art, and the animation in Howl could have come out of the Night on Bald Mountain section. In the end, it worked, I think, by keeping the viewer visually in the world of the poem itself, rather than in the biographical material about Ginsberg or the trial and the litigants. So if you want to watch a movie about a poem, and the poet and his friends, but mainly about the poem, this one does a pretty good job.

I was pretty skeptical of this film's premise: that it could simultaneously do justice visually to one of the most iconic and bizarre pieces of poetry in American history while saying something new and interesting about both Ginsberg and the infamous obscenity trial.Boy, was I wrong!The juxtaposition of black-and-white shots of Ginsberg reading aloud from "Howl" in a coffee shop (even the crowd was amazingly well portrayed) and the animation sequences that did a brilliant job of illustrating even very complex passages was utterly phenomenal. Weaving the artistry in with a rambling soliloquy by Ginsberg and layering in increasing bites of the trial itself created a rich tapestry in which to enjoy the multi-dimensional lives of Ginsberg and his colleagues and friends and lovers.There were several occasions on which I thought the transitions were a little rough, and a couple of scenes dragged on a bit too long, but only those minor blemishes kept this film from scoring a rare 10/10 from me.