Peter Hujar’s Day is a biography unlike any you’ve previously seen on screen — maddening for some and transcendent for others, shaped by national treasure/director Ira Sachs (Passages, Keep the Lights On).
Here photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) accounts for a 1974 day to his friend, journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). Rosenkrantz’s concept was a sound one: interview artists about the structure of their days in exhaustive detail. And though the scope of the project was never fully realized, her interview with photographer Hujar survived, an odd balm that understands the grind of being an artist and the fact that it doesn’t change (despite what AI-mongers would have you believe), as well as a portrait of process that makes a moment live again, with the strength of specificity and a gathering emotional power.
We weren’t there. Even if you were part of the New York art scene of the early ’70s, you weren’t there for this day spent trying to wrangle Ginsberg and Orlovsky, or attempting to get paid for past-due invoices, or pinballing between anxiety and accomplishment without letting anyone else know. But this film casts a spell and makes the drone and the dread of artistic life into liturgy, enacted at kitchen tables, over infinite cigarettes, in rooftop tableaux, in extemporized dance numbers — the breath of life exhaled in the possibilities of where a day can take you.
Whishaw and Hall are superb, presenting a friendship grounded in countless infinitesimal moments. Each detail — in clothes, in color, in the sounds of the city — as perfect as needed. So specific you could touch it. So expansive you could never get your arms or mind around it fully.
Fame is actually just a subset of being remembered. The micro from the macro. And this film is a triumphant work of earthy grace.
