Ben Whishaw Brilliantly Conjures a Long Lost Artist in Peter Hujar’s Day

In December 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz sat down with her friend Peter Hujar—a photographer who was a fixture of New York City’s downtown arts scene—for a particular kind of conversation. Rosenkrantz was working on a project in which she asked friends and acquaintances, many of them from the same creative and social circle, to simply recount what they did the day before. It was meant to be compiled into a collection, but the project never materialized. Hujar’s transcript survived, though, and now the great queer indie filmmaker Ira Sachs has turned it into a film.

Peter Hujar’s Day, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, is just two actors—Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall—acting out the transcript as they move around an apartment, have a light meal, and smoke some cigarettes. That may not sound like a terribly dynamic premise for a film. It is certainly a reduction in scale from Sach’s last film, the lively and thoughtful relationship dramedy Passages. Maybe this new film is meant mostly as a kind of museum piece, a staging of a small historical record rather than commercial cinema.

Except Sachs does find a way to make the film feel, well, like a proper movie. All this nattering away about the quotidian details of a man’s day coalesces into deep meaning. It certainly helps that Hujar rubbed elbows with some very notable names. A chunk of his recap involves a weird trip to an East Village apartment where the poet Allen Ginsberg was staying—Hujar had been commissioned to photograph Ginsberg for a New York Times piece. That’s a pretty major figure to spend some time with, but Hujar recounts their interaction with an offhanded amusement. Nothing all that remarkable happened during this meeting of the minds, which in some ways makes it all the more remarkable.

The great, sneaking power of Peter Hujar’s Day is how it acts as a kind of time machine, delving a contemporary audience into the minutia of a storied period and place. While New York City in the 1970s was certainly bedeviled by many problems, it is still nostalgically yearned for as an incubator for cool. A revolutionary set of artists took the counter-culture advancements of the beatniks and morphed them into something edgier, wryer, perhaps even more populist. Many of them were queer, writers and artists and photographers who set a certain cultural tone that informs gay life to this day. It was more than just Andy Warhol, though he was of course an emblem of the scene.

Hujar was assuredly one of those people, even if his contributions were only fully appreciated after his death from AIDS complications in 1987. What we hear in Sachs’s film suggests that Hujar was an oddball wit who approached matters of sex and career and even food with a pleasant frankness. This is just a man having a conversation with a friend (albeit an awfully one-sided one), and that casual context allows for something more revealing than a formal interview might. Peter Hujar’s Day may be only a glimpse, but its smallness proves fascinating. This is the kind of seemingly banal information that tends not to be preserved.

To get a peek into the normalcy of a now legendary life is stirring and sad. Day to day, even icons were mostly regular people with their own little hangups and peccadillos, their own private habits and wishes and resentments. Sachs gives gracious space to all that precious data, shooting his film with a hushed, fuzzy intimacy. He imagines different locations in Hujar’s apartment, the conversation moving the pair of interlocutors from a table to a bed to the roof of the building, twilight New York twinkling in the background, the glow and rush of a city hurtling through time. It’s all rather lovely, a patient and affectionate consideration of a person who has no idea that he will be closely listened to 50 years later, long after he’s gone.

Whishaw’s performance greatly contributes to the film’s ruminative mood. His accent—Hujar was from working-class Trenton, New Jersey—may be a bit shaky here and there, but he otherwise wholly renders an individual’s particular cadence and affect. He gives rhythm and texture to Hujar’s extemporaneous ramble, coloring anecdotes with flecks of humor, or melancholy, or desire. It’s humble but thorough work, inviting us into a stranger’s life so that we may better understand the constancy of maybe all humanity. We are reminded of how close we are to Hujar and Rosenkrantz in the continuum of history. Peter Hujar’s Day finds the profundity in the ordinary, in what is to simply wake up and eat and talk and wonder—happily unaware of the planet spinning along.