Peter Hujar's Day

"Peter Hujar's Day" is a veristic and voluble delight, an exercise in eavesdropping on a pair of smart, funny people who wear posterity—there’s a tape recorder running, after all—with wry lightness.

I’ll come right to the point about this one: As it stands now, the latest work from writer-director Ira Sachs is a strong candidate for my worst film of 2025. This is likely to be an unpopular opinion, especially among arthouse aficionados, particularly in light of its (inexplicable) five Independent Spirit Award nominations. However, this easily has to be one of the most overrated releases of the year for a variety of reasons. The film is based on a book of the same name written by author Linda Rosenkrantz, a good friend of the title character, Peter Hujar, a New York art photographer who attained only a modest level of success during his lifetime (1934-1987) but who has since been the subject of greater notoriety and a number of retrospective gallery shows. In 1974, Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) launched a book project in which she asked a number of her artist friends to write down all of the events in a day of their lives, after which she planned to interview them about their accounts, with Hujar (Ben Whishaw) being one of her subjects. The book itself never came to fruition, but, many years later, a transcript of her interview with Hujar surfaced, providing the basis for the subsequent book and this film. In essence, this release is a filmed chronicle of that interview, a day-long conversation between the two friends, somewhat in the same vein as “My Dinner with Andre” (1981). Understandably, cinematic experiments like this are not everyone’s cup of tea (mine included), but I strive to keep an open mind, an undeniable chore where this production is concerned. The conversation and its chronicle of it is vapid, unfocused, unengaging, and, above all, boring (underline and Italicize that sentence, please). The content consists of a strung-together collection of stream of consciousness nonsense, incidental drivel, superficial gossip and shameless name dropping of the duo’s friends in the New York arts community, including the likes of Alan Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz and Susan Sontag, to name a few. And, unless one is familiar with any of these individuals, the passing references to them are likely to mean absolutely nothing. The same goes for the topics that Rosenkrantz and Hujar banter back and forth about. From the foregoing, it would seem that the backers behind this vanity project have a personal interest in and admiration for its subject, and that’s fine, except that it doesn’t make for particularly engaging viewing, its content being too inside to be meaningful. Those “in the know” will probably find this utterly fascinating, but, in all likelihood, they represent a microscopic portion of the moviegoing public. For the rest of us, thankfully, the film comes in at a merciful 100 runtime (though it seems a lot longer), and that is perhaps its only saving grace. Regrettably, Sachs is usually a fairly reliable filmmaker, but he’s missed the boat on this one, and, unless you’re a diehard fan of Hujar and his work, you’d be wise to stay ashore, too.