Two of the biggest gay interest movies of the year, the Daniel Radcliffe starred Kill Your Darlings and Matthew McConaughey’s Dallas Buyers Club, has just been given their US cinema release dates.
Sony Pictures Classics has set Kill Your Darlings for a limited theatrical run starting on October 18th, with plans to roll it out nationally after that. Focus Features meanwhile has given Dallas Buyers Club a prime Oscar slot, with a release planned for December 6th.
Kill Your Darlings charts how a murder helped shape the lives of a group of young men who went on to become the beat generation. Chronicle star DeHaan plays Lucien Carr, the man who introduced Howl writer Allen Ginsberg to the likes of William S. Burroughs (Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Huston).
During these early, hedonistic days, a man called David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) fell for Carr, with his infatuation becoming increasingly obsessive and unhinged – the gay Ginsberg once discovered Kammerer trying to murder Jack Kerouac’s cat. It eventually resulted in Carr stabbing Kammerer to death him and going to prison for his murder. The violent event is said to have indelibly changed all the people involved and etched its way into the published works of the Beat writers.
Dallas Buyers Club sees McConaughey as real-life Texas electrician Ron Woodroof, an ordinary man who found himself in a life-or-death battle with the medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies. In 1986, Ron was blindsided by being diagnosed as HIV-positive and given 30 days to live.
With the US still internally divided over how to combat the virus and restricting medications, Ron grabbed hold of non-toxic alternative treatments from all over the world by means both legal and illegal. Seeking to avoid government sanctions against selling non-approved medicines and supplements, he established a “buyers club,” which fellow HIV-positive people could join for access to his supplies.
Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto (as a cross-dressing gay man), Steve Zahn, Dallas Robert and Griffin Dunne also star.