People who lived in New York in the 1970s and ’80s are always cautioning against over-romanticizing the era: a dirt-cheap apartment often meant living with a bathtub sprouting from the middle of your kitchen, or having to step around junkies on your doorstep. You could be mugged at any hour of the day or night. But who could be blamed for wanting to live in the New York of Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, a 76-minute movie that feels quiet and modest while you’re watching it, only to fill the air around you once you’re left to sit with it a while? This is a New York movie that takes place solely within the walls of one apartment—a pretty nice one, not a dump—on Dec. 19, 1974. Yet it’s the quintessential film for anyone who loves the city as it is now, or as it was then. I’d wager that anyone who has walked through the city at night, marveling at its rows of exquisitely workaday prewar apartment buildings, has at some point looked up toward a window lit with life and wondered who might have lived there 50 years ago, or a hundred. Peter Hujar’s Day captures that elusive feeling of the past catching up with the present, in a city alive with whispering ghosts.
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New York is a city of talkers, and there’s a lot of talking in Peter Hujar’s Day. Sachs adapted the script from the rambling daylong interview that writer Linda Rosenkrantz conducted with photographer Peter Hujar on that winter day in 1974. She’d intended to do a whole book of interviews with New Yorkers in her orbit, detailing how they went about their days, though the project never materialized. The Hujar interview tapes, long lost, eventually resurfaced, appearing in book form in 2022. They’re the foundation for Sachs’ script, a whirl of friendly gossip, unselfconscious name dropping, and half-formed thoughts that paradoxically make perfect sense.
Ben Whishaw plays Hujar, admired for his art photography at the time, though he needed to do commercial work to pay the bills. Rosenkrantz is played by Rebecca Hall, an actor who always seems alive with electricity, even when she’s not moving a muscle; she doesn’t so much ply Hujar with questions as provide a receptive landing space for the explosion of details he provides about everything that happened to him the day before. Many of these things are tiny non-events, though his brain has recorded them with a photographer’s specificity.
Hujar begins at the beginning, recounting how his day started: an editor from Elle Magazine was going to come by to pick up a photograph—hopefully, he’d get paid for it? He hadn’t worked that part out. He mentions a fleeting straight-guy fantasy he’d entertained for a hot minute—maybe he’d be “seduced by the Elle girl”?—before moving on to other matters. Later in the day, he’d be going over to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment to photograph the groovy-avuncular poet for the New York Times, his first assignment for the paper, and an important one. But first, not long after awakening, he takes a little nap; later he’ll take another. When Rosenkrantz teases him about his excessive snoozing, he insists that “the first one wasn’t a nap, it was a continuation of my sleep,” a brilliant snippet of artist logic that you might be tempted to put into practice yourself. As Whishaw plays him, Hujar has an alluring, elfin carnality; he’s a seductive jokester, keyed into both the banality and the cracked glamour of the artist’s life. He’ll take it all.
Hujar and Rosencrantz talk all day and into the night, their patter a ribbony scroll of who’s who and who’s cool in their New York. Robert Wilson, Peter Orlovsky, Tuli Kupferberg, Glenn O’Brien: even if not all of them have been forgotten, some aren’t quite fully remembered—Peter Hujar’s Day puts a gentle spotlight on them once again. As Hujar and Rosencrantz talk, the light filtering through the windows changes, from milky sunshine to dusky late-afternoon velvet, and their moods shift too. Their costumes also change throughout the day, not because the characters have literally changed outfits, but because every long, rich, meandering conversation involves figurative costume changes, segues and digressions that are just as expressive as our clothes are. Hujar and Rosencrantz are friends; their conversation has a loping ease. At one point they laze about on the bed, their limbs gently entwined, not like lovers but like bear cubs. Sachs and his actors capture the texture of the easy, affectionate friendships we have when we’re young and beautiful (even if we have no idea how beautiful we are)—maybe this is what Adam and Eve were like before they were kicked out of Eden, before sex and shame entered the picture.
Hujar died in 1987, at age 53, 10 months after being diagnosed with AIDS. Though he was not exactly famous outside downtown New York art circles during his lifetime, his work—particularly his elegantly expressive black-and-white portraits—came to represent a vivid swath of 1970s and ’80s New York. His 1969 photograph “Orgasmic Man,” a portrait of a man caught in the shimmering cross-current between pain and near-religious erotic ecstasy, found new life when it was used on the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life, a book we all saw in airport bookstores, being read on the subway, or carried around to fill in the idle moments of a random day. Even if you didn’t know who Peter Hujar was, suddenly you knew that photograph.
Peter Hujar’s Day gives Peter Hujar another kind of life. Sachs is attuned to both the costs and the pleasures of living in the godforsaken place known as New York. In his 2014 Love Is Strange, an aging couple (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina), recently married, are forced to live separately when a change in their financial situation forces them to sell their artsy, decidedly un-ostentatious apartment. It’s a movie about love, New York, and real estate, perhaps not even in that order; it’s about how New York can be both lovely and hateful, sometimes from one hour to the next. Peter Hujar’s Day is both dreamier and more concrete. Its New York is a place where the past, no matter how many buildings we knock down and replace, no matter how many beloved stores and restaurants we lose, keeps reaching around to touch the present. You can feel that past—those many pasts—vibrating from every lit-up window, because everywhere in the city, on any given evening, there’s someone talking about the minutiae of their day. Are we made of stardust or just the random stuff we do? Maybe they’re one and the same.