‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Review: Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall Take an Illuminating Snapshot of a Queer Artist in Ira Sachs’ Gorgeous Character Study

Anyone who saw Chris McKim’s kinetic 2020 documentary collage about the late David Wojnarowicz more than likely was haunted also by the other ghost very much present in that film, Peter Hujar. The downtown art scene photographer was Wojnarowicz’s lover briefly and then a lifelong friend and mentor. Hujar’s death in 1987 at age 53 from AIDS-related causes fired up the younger Wojnarowicz’s political activism in the five remaining years before he, too, succumbed to the disease at 37.

Knowledge of that ticking clock is one of many affecting veins of melancholy subtext running through Ira Sachs’ uniquely beautiful experiment in verbatim first-person biography, Peter Hujar’s Day, a work that ranks among the director’s best. Led by a performance of transfixing grace and subtlety from Ben Whishaw in the title role, the diaristic film spins compacted time into something free-flowing, expansive, illuminating and emotionally resonant, all of it achieved with elegant restraint.

Running a fleet 76 minutes, the feature sprang from the discovery in 2019 of tapes previously believed to have been lost, recording an extended 1974 conversation between Hujar and his writer friend Linda Rosenkrantz for her unrealized book project on the daily lives of artists. Continuing along lines similar to her 1968 “nonfiction-fiction” novel, Talk, Rosenkrantz asked various subjects to write a detailed account of everything they did on a random day, from wake-up to lights out. The transcripts that provide the meat of Sachs’ script document Hujar elaborating on those hours of minutiae the following afternoon in Linda’s airy Manhattan apartment.

Rosenkrantz is played in the two-hander by Rebecca Hall with warmth and humor and a physical ease that makes Linda much more centered and self-contained than Whishaw’s chain-smoking, often fidgeting Peter. But the two actors’ body language together conveys the solidity of a friendship in which they can be completely unguarded with each other.

This sounds like the most improbable idea for a movie — lending itself more organically to a stage piece or an art installation — and yet it’s rich and full-bodied and intoxicatingly cinematic. Sachs plays on the discordance between his naturalistic approach and the theatricality of the project with meta elements like a quick glimpse of the crew or posed shots of the actors occasionally punctuating the conversation, accompanied by blasts of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. Just the casting of two Brits to play quintessential New Yorkers adds another layer of abstraction.

Sachs has been a distinctive observer of New York life in movies like Keep the Lights On, Love is Strange and Little Men. But Peter Hujar’s Day is closer to docu-fiction than anything he’s done since his striking 1996 feature debut, The Delta, a study of gay desire as candid as it is dreamy. The new film is also one of the most descriptive evocations of the 1970s downtown art scene I’ve encountered since Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids.

Whishaw was riveting in the least showy role of Sachs’ love-triangle drama Passages, bringing a slow-burn interiority to the seemingly accommodating husband of a narcissist whose manipulations he ultimately rejects. In his second collaboration with the director, the actor is arguably even better. Here, he’s an open book, at least in the trusted company of Linda. The performance is thrillingly lived-in — from Peter’s contemplative thought process to the seductive fluidity of his movements.

Unlike his contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar was one of the relatively under-appreciated Lower Manhattan artworld figures that formed a bridge between Andy Warhol and later superstars Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A key aspect of his photography — at that time focused largely on black-and-white portraits — was the intimacy communicated by Hujar’s connection to his subjects. The connection of Sachs and his actors to this material is also what makes Peter Hujar’s Day so alive.

One of the movie’s more amusing stretches is Peter’s account of a job photographing Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times the previous day. Already, when choosing what coat would be most appropriate to wear, Peter signals an awareness that his E 12th St. address (above what is now the Village East movie theater) would be perceived as having less cred than Ginsberg’s Lower East Side place on E 10th. Indeed, once he gets down there, Peter feels he’s being looked at like an alien by people on the street.

Ginsberg’s abrasiveness — already apparent in an earlier phone call in which he makes sniffy comments about the Times’ preference for conventional portraits — did not soften in person. When Peter Orlovsky opens the door to their rundown tenement apartment, Hujar is left standing around awkwardly until Ginsberg acknowledges him. In Peter’s retelling, the actual shoot is no warmer — zero connection — though the acerbic edge with which he describes Ginsberg seated in the lotus position and chanting in the charred doorway of a burned-out butcher shop, is delicious.

Other famous names of the era pop up. When Peter tells Ginsberg he’s scheduled to photograph William S. Burroughs later that week, Ginsberg bluntly suggests that if Hujar wants to get a good picture, “You should suck his cock.” Peter’s photos of Lauren Hutton are to be published in Vogue, but the fantasy he had built around the French editor who came by his apartment in the morning to approve the shots is dismantled when she has no clue as to what he will be paid. Being adequately compensated for his work is a nagging concern. A call from Susan Sontag sparks discussion with Linda about the value of having the essayist write an introduction to his book of photographs.

But even when he’s relaying the most banal parts of his day — going back to bed for a morning nap, buying cigarettes or a liverwurst sandwich and painstakingly noting the prices of everything, a friend whose hot water is off coming over to shower and then ordering Chinese — Whishaw makes Peter a fascinating subject.

Whether sitting up on the couch or lying down as if he’s in therapy; migrating to the table for cookies and tea, then returning later for a Nutella sandwich and apple pie; or draped alongside Linda on her bed and moving in for an occasional snuggle, the actor gives Peter a faint but appealing hint of self-dramatization. His fluttering hands almost seem part of a performance, but at the same time spontaneous. Whishaw gives the character an air that’s sexy and sad, cool and vulnerable, eager to be a star but anxious for his work to stand on its own.

Through all this, Hall makes Linda an active listener, alert to every nuance of what Peter is saying, supportive of his worries and interjecting now and then with thoughtful questions or comments. Both actors shape three-dimensional characters out of two people simply mulling over the tiny incidents of a day, from the trivial to the significant. The beauty of Whishaw and Hall’s work here is that they can seem to be doing nothing at all while communicating so much.

There are charming light moments between them, too, like an impromptu dance when they spin Tennessee Joe’s 1957 rockabilly hit “Hold Me Tight” on the stereo. The talk turns gossipy when Peter tells Linda about an early evening call from an occasional hook-up, raising his eyebrows about the guy’s insistence on playing rough trade. They laugh over a friend of his who formed a band, made up exclusively of people who can neither sing nor play instruments; and over people claiming to have seen the entirely fictitious musician Topaz Caucasian perform.

Directed with rigorous control, Sachs’ audacious experiment finds an idiosyncratic spot between Warhol’s static people-sitting-around-talking movies and more structured pieces like Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre or the recent docudrama Reality, assembled from FBI transcripts.

The obsessive attention to detail in Hujar’s recounting of his day also made me think of the droll chapter in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) titled The Tingle, in which the author gives a word-for-word report of a morning phone call from Brigid Berlin, who talks him through every step of her maniacal cleaning process.

Edited by Affonso Gonçalves with a supple flow, Peter Hujar’s Day further conjures its era via the gorgeous grainy textures of exciting new-talent DP Alex Ashe’s 16mm visuals. The camera follows Peter and Linda as they shift around in the spacious split-level apartment (Westbeth Artists Housing in the West Village served as an apt stand-in) with intermittent forays out onto the roof, the passing hours suggested by gradual changes in the light.

Poetic in its simplicity yet crafted with as meticulous attention to detail as Hujar’s reflections on his day, this is a singular meditation on the life of an influential artist for whom major recognition came only after his death. It has the feel of a rare find plucked from a dusty archive.