Lousy movies about poets

Kill Your Darlings is not what you might expect, which is to say it's not about Hemingway but about Alan Ginsberg - a writer for whom, well, let's say I think most of his darlings survived. I thought I might like a movie about Ginsberg's days at Columbia, a portrait of the artist as a young man, and a look at the nascent beat generation - Kerouac, Burroughs, and, central to the movie if much less so to 20th century american literature, Lucien Carr. Unfortunately, my interest in and affection for these writers made me like the film less rather than more - I can accept that these guys were young writers with grandiose ideas and an antic spirit, but this movie makes them seem like, act like, a bunch of prankish high-school kids. I hated the overly determined scenes, so typical of a bad biopic, in which topics and ideas are artlessly put forward by having our hero confront a obvious targets and straw men - the tweedy English prof who argues that all literature must have meter and rhyme. Much better would be to dramatize Ginsberg's intelligent interactions with a truly smart prof and critic, such as Trilling. In the end, couldn't manage to watch the whole picture - leaving me thinking it's a movie only for those who love the Beats and they'll probably hate it (to paraphrase a famous review of a movie about Search for Lost Time). Why do poets make such lousy subjects for movies? Remember the dreadful Bright Star, about Keats - declaiming love sonnets and coughing blood? Anyone working on a TS Eliot biopic - Coffee Spoons? KYD is by no means a dreadful movie, just a let-down - you can use your time better by reading Ginsberg, or any poet, for 90 minutes.