Peter Hujar’s Day

By Joanna Langfield

Ira Sachs’s newest feels like an experimental theatre piece, daring and unique. But its rewards are far richer than that.

The film is an adaptation of a day’s long conversation between revolutionary queer photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, originally recorded on audio and later adapted into a book. It was part of a series the author was conducting, asking people how they spent their day. The particular day Hujar reluctantly agrees to discuss takes place in 1974, predominantly in the cooler than cool Lower East Side of Manhattan. Hujar, whose portraits of many in the so-called Andy Warhol crowd, became recognized as one of the major American photographers of his time, but earned that primarily after his untimely death from AIDS in 1987.

So, Hujar’s day is pretty damn interesting. Tucked amongst the more routine are stories about photographing a cranky Allen Ginsberg, hanging with William Burroughs, Susan Sontag and the new kid on the block, Fran Liebowitz. Evocative doesn’t even come close to describing how delicious this is for those of us familiar with this tantalizing time.

Even at a short 76 minutes, there are some sags along the way. Sachs tries to move things along with staging and fancy camera work, but I didn’t think any of that was necessary. I would have been happy, make that delighted, to just sit and watch Rebecca Hall and the consistently top notch Ben Whishaw do their thing.

And what things they do. Hall, in the more supportive of the roles, brings a calm encouragement, eliciting more and more juicy stuff. But it’s Whishaw who I couldn’t take my eyes off of. Taking the challenge of physicalizing an audio transcript, he not only captures us, but Hujar, too, while making this superb performance very much his own.