Peter Hujar’s Day. 2025. USA. Written and directed by Ira Sachs. With Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall. DCP courtesy Janus Films. 76 min.
In December 1974, photographer Peter Hujar met with writer Linda Rosenkrantz at her Upper East Side apartment and recounted his previous day in minute detail. Rosenkrantz’s planned book about how artists spend their time never transpired, but the remarkable exchange now comes to life in Ira Sachs’s enthralling new film starring the magnetic Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. From day to night, in and around a New York interior, Whishaw-as-Hujar describes a nerve-wracking photo shoot with Allen Ginsberg and a phone call from Susan Sontag, among his daily goings-on. Sachs’s ingenious mise-en-scène explodes the conventions of the biopic and makes something extraordinary from the quotidian, where Hujar’s incisiveness and intensity vibrate alongside the intimacy of the shared moment. Peter Hujar’s Day is a pure expression of a period in Downtown New York that continues to thrive in the public imagination, while vividly evoking the creative mind of a singular artist.
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