Critic Reviews

[An] exemplary documentary.

Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

A stirring requiem of rage and resistance.

“Wojnarowicz” is impressive as a tapestry woven near-whole from preexisting materials, amplifying its subject’s own voice in every creative form it took. Editor Dave Stanke merits kudos alongside McKim for their evocative, first-rate assembly.

McKim’s documentary is as jangly and urgent as its subject and his art, and it packs a melancholy wallop, using the artist’s own running commentary via cassette tape (there were two hundred hours of it) and layering it over snatches of Wojnarowicz’s Super 8 films, countless photographs, and recollections from those who were both there at the start of Wojnarowicz’s career and at the end of his life.

[A] terrific and informative documentary.

Chris McKim’s documentary is an amalgamation of everything David Wojnarowicz leaves behind to inspire rebellion beyond the grave.

Blending Wojnarowicz’s own audio journals with input from a handful of his contemporaries, Chris McKim’s startling and meticulously edited new movie captures the spirit of the artist as he was, bracing and in-your-face.

Overall, however, the viewer gets an essential introduction to Wojnarowicz—enough to foster a desire to look more deeply into his own, numerous written accounts of his life, and to examine their own upholdings of moral decency in art, sex and access to an unencumbered life.