Bounding up to greet me in London’s Charlotte Street Hotel, John Krokidas is warm, excitable and easily distracted. I’m here to talk about his Beat Generation biopic Kill Your Darlings, but his sheer exuberance means that it takes a while to steer him onto the topic. Krokidas almost begins to answer a question, before interrupting himself to grill me about my jacket (a present from my mother): “Your mum has good taste. My mum still buys me sweaters from the shopping mall to dress me up like I’m 11 years old.”

Like his knitwear, Krokidas’s love of the Beats is a hangover from his formative years: “I grew up in the 90s in suburban Connecticut. I remember the first week that I went to high school, somebody wrote an anonymous letter to the school paper explaining that they were gay. The general reaction was, ‘who is the f***ing faggot? We’re going to kill him.’ So I had to put a halt to my own personal sexual aspirations, frankly because I was terrified. But I remember going to a bookstore in the shopping mall – this was before there was the ‘alternative lifestyle’ section – and I found a little copy of Ginsberg’s Reality Sandwiches. I think there were about 57 instances of the word ‘cock.’  That he could be so open and honest about his sexuality, and use it as such a central part of his voice, was shocking to me. It was like having a private person to have my own creative coming-out conversation with. The artists that you discover in your adolescence, they’re the ones that you hold onto for life.”

Though Kill Your Darlings is told from the perspective of Allen Ginsberg (played by a convincingly awkward Daniel Radcliffe), the film’s plot revolves around the life of one Lucien Carr.  His name might not be familiar to many people, but Carr has been credited with inventing the Beat generation. He studied with Ginsberg at Columbia, where he introduced the shy young poet to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs went on to find fame and success, but Carr never made it through his first year at university; following a high-profile court case, he ended up serving a lengthy jail sentence for murdering his lover, David Kammerer.

I ask why Carr’s story went untold for so long: “Carr and Ginsberg continued to have a sort of friendship. Out of respect for Lucien Carr, Ginsberg asked the other Beats not to publish anything about the murder. They all agreed to bury it. The book that Kerouac and Burroughs wrote about the murder [And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks] wasn’t published until after Carr’s death.” Exactly what happened on the night of Kammerer’s death is still unclear, and Krokidas resists the trying to fill in the blanks: “This is not the story of what happened that night. This is the story of how Allen Ginsberg ended up processing what happened by writing a story about it.” Ginsberg would later submit the story as part of his university coursework: “It’s amazing. Columbia University called it ‘smutty’ and ‘absurd’. It was the very first piece of fiction that he wrote. This murder was really a huge crucible for all of these guys to start writing.”

Dramatising the lives of your personal heroes can be difficult, particularly when their families are still around to pass judgement. According to Krokidas, however, the response has been positive: “We worked heavily with the Burroughs estate to get his character right, and I know that they liked the script. That’s the thing that I found the most moving. Representatives from the estate watched my interview at Sundance, and afterwards one of them said to Peter Hale, who works for the Ginsberg estate, ‘That Krokidas? I think he’s one of us.’” It’s easy to see why Krokidas is in such a good mood – he’s had the one review that really matters.