150 Word Review: 'Peter Hujar's Day' (2025)
Chatbot, 1970s-style
This experimental found text biopic is absorbing. Writer/director Ira Sachs adapts the transcript of a 1974 interview, once lost, between queer photographer and chronicler of New York’s downtown art scene, Peter Hujar, and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Their conversation is convivial and straggling, and Sachs turns it into a long, intimate hangout between friends.
For 76 minutes, Ben Winshaw, as Hujar, distant and intense, and Rebecca Hall, as Rosenkrantz, alert and amused, kibbitz about the minutiae of Hujar’s day. His memory is near photographic, and it’s the anodyne details, the forgettable moments, meals, and names he rattles off that are the best parts. Some of those names dropped are legends: Allen Ginsberg shows up as an unexpected antagonist. Peter Hujar’s Day is a portrait of a city that takes place in an apartment. Sachs has faith in his source material. He’s patient with Hujar’s stream-of-consciousness. Every day is an entire life.
Thanks for the link fix. I will definitely try to find this. I live in NYC and am fascinated by the art world of the 70s. From what I've heard about the rest of the 70s in the City, however, not sure if I would have enjoyed actually living there then! I keep thinking of the reaction of today's hordes of tourists if they entered a time warp and ended up in NY in, say, 1977--panic, most likely.
Every day is an entire life 😭🙏🏼