‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ review: Ira Sachs gently brings 1970s New York to life through a dramatic experiment

From Ira Sachs — director of the striking contemporary queer drama Passages — the 1970s New York-set Peter Hujar’s Day is a confined, two-character experiment that’s far more about mood than plot. Set almost entirely in one apartment over the course of a single day, its mere 76 minutes are languidly paced, though that’s a major part of its success. Few filmmakers have so distinctly evoked an era without so much as pointing their camera out through a window to capture the street below.

The film is reconstructed from a transcript, once thought to be lost, of an interview with gay New York photographer Peter Hujar (Passages star Ben Whishaw) conducted by writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). The recording resurfaced in 2019 — Rosenkrantz has since published it as a book under the same title as the movie — but Sachs doesn’t merely restage the interview as written. Rather, he extrapolates what feels like an entire lifetime from words alone.

What is Peter Hujar’s Day about?

Describing Peter Hujar’s Day runs the risk of oversimplifying it, but the film’s simplicity is its charm. Beginning on a random December morning in 1974, the curious Rosenkrantz — who ran in the same circles as Hujar, creating a sense of intimacy — asks him to recall all the things he did the previous day. As her two-spool tape recorder spins (resembling a film projector in both appearance and sound), Hujar goes about his day and the duo move about his East Village apartment as he narrates, in flowery detail, events that might have seemed unremarkable at the time but take on a greater significance in retrospect.

This is not unlike the way Hujar’s photography would come to be perceived. His black-and-white portraits made few waves at the time — certainly not compared to contemporaries like Andy Warhol — but they have since been canonized as having brought a subtle texture and depth to his subjects, physically and psychologically. As Nan Goldin once wrote of Hujar’s personal artistry: “His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way. Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh.”

Although the film doesn’t take its cues from Hujar’s images (except for a few dreamlike interludes), Sachs attempts to unearth a similarly lifelike dimensionality. His shots — mostly still, though sometimes moving gradually across space — help craft a sense of intrigue. This goes hand-in-hand with Whishaw’s thoroughly considered performance, which feels free and uninhibited in its motions, whether Hujar moves from room to room or simply fidgets on his couch.

Sachs generally excels at creating this sense of life between the creases, and Peter Hujar’s Day is among his finest aesthetic achievements. Not only does its form evoke a specific time and place, but it creates a distinct relationship between its mid-’70s setting and the present right from the word go.

Peter Hujar’s Day is an artistic bridge between eras.

The New York of today would be alien to Hujar’s New York, and vice versa. The city was certainly grimier in the 1970s, with more danger and more edge — think Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver — but it was also the cradle of a burgeoning American arts’ scene that has since been priced out for several decades.

Throughout the film, Hujar makes mention of his East Village address and that of other artists he travelled to photograph the previous morning, noting the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods that have long since been gentrified. Granted, to pick up on the significance of these details requires foreknowledge of the city’s modern topography, which certainly shrinks the movie’s intended audience (or at least, those that might pick up everything it’s putting down), but this specificity is an extension of its experimentation.

On the surface, it’s a film of “telling” rather than “showing,” but the inherent obliqueness (and the obfuscating nature) of its dialogue limits how much of it can be considered exposition. If anything, it is in fact a film of “showing” in a macro sense — of depicting Hujar’s thoughts and feelings towards each description — with Rosenkrantz as his mostly silent foil, whose input on his recollections becomes known without words.

The film’s 16mm cinematography by Alex Ashe evokes that place and time’s No Wave cinema scene, led by the likes of John Cassavetes, with its distinct celluloid textures and ever-so-slightly blown-out highlights, as though it were cheaply produced. The acoustic qualities add to this DIY feeling, which includes flaws and faded noises in the audio recordings, as though the movie’s entire soundtrack (rather than the interview transcript) were the thing that had been rediscovered, and the film were merely adding physical dimensions to something heard.

Alongside the ambient noises of New York, from ambulance sirens to noisy streets, each physical element on screen stands out in the soundtrack: glasses, dishware, even chairs being dragged so Hujar and Rosenkrantz can sit. Sachs’ repeated shots of the tape recorder serve to remind us that what we’re watching is a recreation or restaging of the past. The movie even opens with a clapper board, and features frequent jump-cuts despite its at-length scenes. We even catch occasional glimpses of modern crew members putting boom mics in place. However, this Brechtian quality never detracts from the movie’s lived-in, realistic feel.

The characters never wink at the camera, or even acknowledge it, despite Sachs drawing our attention to the artifice. We’re never watching actors play a part. Rather, we’re watching historical figures through a modern lens, a self-reflexive exercise in which the present and the past exist simultaneously, creating a contrast between life and artistry as it once was, and now is — made all the more apparent by Hujar casually invoking the names of famous figures.

Peter Hujar’s Day brings a human quality to figures of the past.

What exactly was “Peter Hujar’s day”? As narrated by Hujar in the film, the preceding 24 hours were mildly annoying, given how many people he had to chase for money and other scheduling confirmations — such is the life of a freelance artist — but they were also eventful, in the sense that they made for a fun recounting. Rosenkrantz barely interjects, in part because she’s a good reporter, letting her subject speak for himself, but in part because she, like the audience, is familiar with the specific people Hujar refers to in his story: the likes of critic Susan Sontag, poet Allen Ginsberg, and author William S. Burroughs.

The difference between the characters’ relationship to these figures and the audience’s is that to the former, they’re acquaintances, whereas to us, they’re pillars of modern Western culture, which makes for a fascinating disconnect. Peter Hujar’s Day practically lives within this dissonant space, wherein everything that’s mundane for Hujar and Rosenkrantz is destined to have a historic quality some five decades later.

That these artistic legends are only mentioned and not seen adds, on one hand, a mythic quality to them — one of whispers and rumors — but what’s actually said about them grounds them through a surprisingly cheeky approach. Hujar’s personality, wants, likes, and annoyances all come to the fore through his anecdotes, which exist somewhere between gossip and name-dropping. Each time he narrates his interactions with someone the audience might’ve heard about, he does so quite casually (which makes sense — Hujar doesn’t have the perspective the audience does), adding a humane quality to an often mythologized era, bringing us closer to it in the process.

A film that recalls recollections, and Peter Hujar’s Day is, by its very nature, a film of reflections and refractions. However, it makes its various Xerox copies of the past feel thoroughly original and lifelike, transforming a contained interview into what may as well be a moody, sprawling biopic.

Peter Hujar’s Day was reviewed out of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.