Former Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe took The Woman in Black to the limits of its 12A certificate last year – now he’s pushing this 15 all the way to borderline 18.

Opening in 1943, it’s a timeless freshers’ story about awkwardness and cockiness.

Winning a place at Columbia University leads future poet Allen Ginsberg (Radcliffe) into a destructive social scene where everything from drink and drugs to literary drive, manipulation, jealousy and an uncommon sexuality will have fatal consequences.

Ginsberg’s troubled mother wants him at home.

But with fellow writers Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and William Burroughs (Ben Foster) to meet, Ginsberg is soon at the heart of an all-male love triangle involving the charismatic Lucien Carr (played by the ‘young DiCaprio’ actor Dane DeHaan) and the tragic David Kammerer (Michael C Hall, sounding like Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Based on an untold true story with Kerouac, Burroughs and Carr all becoming murder suspects, debut director John Krokidas unflinchingly shoots even the film’s most dramatic moments with an unusually shallow depth of field.

Kill Your Darlings is inevitably sexually explicit, but two mock hangings are more shocking.

For the impressive Radcliffe, this is a job well done despite the hair and black-rimmed glasses suggesting that JK Rowling’s wizard can now travel 70 years back in time like Doctor Who.

During early scenes which soon morph into a university challenge akin to Hogwarts meets Dead Poets Society, he’s even got a broom!

Even so, few Potter fans will be tempted to chance their luck while most adults will be left with fearsomely bright but relatively unlovable characters.

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