Sundance Deal: Sony Pictures Classics Nabs 'Kill Your Darlings,' Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Young Allen Ginsberg

Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired all U.S., Australian, New Zealand, South African, African TV and Eastern European rights to John Krokidas' debut feature "Kill Your Darlings," which stars Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg and is a dramatic competition feature at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film, which is co-written by Krokidas and Austin Bunn, also stars Sundance breakout Dane DeHaan ("Chronicle"), Michael C. Hall ("Dexter"), Ben Foster (who has a role in the fest's buzzy western-neo-noir "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), Jack Huston ("Boardwalk Empire"), Elizabeth Olsen (Sundance entry "Very Good Girls"), David Cross and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It centers on a 1944 murder that brought together Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac (Huston) and William Burroughs (Foster) while the young men were at Columbia University.

Buyers were circling carefully on this one, as recent Kerouac adaptation "On the Road," albeit less commercially viable than "Kill Your Darlings," disappointed at the holiday box office, flanked by steep year-end competition.

Check out our review roundup of the film here.

An extended synopsis via Sundance:

While he is attending Columbia University in 1944, the young Allen Ginsberg’s life is turned upside down when he sets eyes on Lucien Carr, an impossibly cool and boyishly handsome classmate. Carr opens Ginsberg up to a bohemian world and introduces him to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Repelled by rules and conformity in both life and literature, the four agree to tear down tradition and make something new, ultimately formulating the tenets of and giving birth to what became the Beat movement. On the outside, looking in, is David Kammerer, a man in his thirties desperately in love with Carr. When Kammerer is found dead, and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Carr are arrested in conjunction with the murder, the nascent artists’ lives change forever.

Daniel Radcliffe fearlessly takes on the role of the young Ginsberg on a journey of discovery—to find his sexuality and his voice as a writer.