Daniel Radcliffe’s bum gets great action. A still popular video circulating the internet shows him on his press tour for this film, over a woman’s knee letting a British radio host play his ass like a bongo. And just last week, despite much competition (including from Jamie Dornan’s ass, the only nice thing in Fifty Shades of Grey), Daniel Radcliffe took home a most prestigious honor in Great Britain: Rear of the Year. So he seems an appropriate choice for this #MCM. Ever since the muggle movie world’s Harry Potter has grown up, he has made some very interesting choices as an actor (barring the wretched travesty that was What If?): baring his bollocks and bottom for art in the stage production of Equus, and for this Man Crush Monday flick, his turn as Allen Ginsberg in the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings (available for purchase on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Instant).
Radcliffe has proven himself a great straight ally to the queer community, and given his hetero lady and gay male fanbase plenty to enjoy by taking on a role that required him to participate in a heavy sex scene (we’re not talking Shortbus level, more Brokeback Mountain). I particularly love his story about the makeout scenes in the film when he was promoting it on the Graham Norton Show, and recalled the director yelling at him to do the “crazy fucking sex kissing” the film so desperately needed.
The story of Kill Your Darlings was always ripe for film, because it has a little bit of everything: romance, history, tragedy and a gruesome murder. It follows Allen Ginsberg through his short-lived days at Columbia, when the circle of Beat generation writers came together to tear the ivy from the walls of conservative thought and staid literary traditions, including the infamous, unstable Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). Certainly the film doesn’t delve into Ginsberg’s later years, but rather tries to focus on these formative experiences where he came into his own as a writer and as a gay man. Though it rightly brings important aspects of Ginsberg’s roots (including his love of Whitman) into the fore, I cannot claim that the film is an entirely accurate representation of all the facts about this period of Ginsberg’s life (mostly in regard to Carr and his relationship with Kammerer, the victim of the murder who may or may not have been so innocent after all, depending on who you ask). Despite the artistic liberties taken with aspects of the story (and with Ginsberg’s physical appearance-Radcliffe is much more handsome than Allen ever was), the film gives us a hearty, emotionally honest glimpse of the temperament and environment, the time and the season, of the birth of the Beats without demonizing or demeaning the sexuality of the characters. And to boot, the film offers us a plethora of literary man-candy to gawk at.
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