Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg in ‘Kill Your Darlings’ trailer

Can Harry Potter pull off a transformation into a young Allen Ginsberg, future icon of the Beat generation? According to a spare 30-second teaser from the forthcoming movie “Kill Your Darlings,� the answer is … quite possibly.

John Krokidas’ film, which screened at Sundance and will be shown at the Venice Film Festival’s Venice Days, has a distinct literary appeal, like a Muppet Babies version of the Beat Generation, with actors Jack Huston, Dane DeHaan and Ben Foster taking on the roles of real-life Beats such as Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr and William Burroughs.

It’s a love story about young Carr and Ginsberg’s relationship blooming at Columbia University -- a romance that may have figured into the murder of professor David Kammerer. So far, it seems that Daniel Radcliffe has the look and the voice of Ginsberg as he stammers and mentions Walt Whitman’s hatred of rhyme and meter in a poetry class.

In a video interview with the L.A. Times from the film’s Sundance premiere, DeHaan and Radcliffe discussed the research that went into portraying their real-life characters. Radcliffe had Ginsberg’s diaries, and he cited the “innocent arrogance� of Ginsberg as a young artist. But DeHaan and Radcliffe were most effusive about their kissing scene, and how they’d like to “win the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss.�

“Kill Your Darlings� opens in limited release on Oct. 18.

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