‘Peter Hujar’s Day’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Ira Sachs. US/Ger. 2025. 76mins

One of cinema’s great challenges, how to film two people in a room talking, is answered to beautiful effect in Peter Hujar’s Day – although strictly speaking, the room is a New York apartment, with a brief detour to the roof. It helps that the two actors here, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, are addictively watchable, and that the real-life characters they play, photographer and gay activist Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, are fascinating in their own right, even when (or especially when) their world seems quite mundane.

Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall are addictively watchable

An elegant piece of duo portraiture, and a resonant slice of Manhattan cultural history, Ira Sachs’s succinct non-narrative piece – unveiled in Sundance, then playing Berlin – is unlikely to have the same broad appeal as his 2023 Passages, also starring Whishaw. But it will chime in upmarket outlets, notably with LGBTQ+ crowds and lovers of modern American art, photography and bohemian culture.

Peter Hujar, who died aged 53 in 1987, was a fixture of Manhattan’s downtown scene, known for his portraits of key cultural figures (and for his 1969 photo ‘Orgasmic Man’, currently featured on the cover of Hanya Yanigahara’s best-selling novel A Little Life). Linda Rosenkrantz – who collaborated with Sachs on the film – is a writer whose 1968 novel Talk was based on conversations with friends. In similar vein, she later embarked on a project using recordings in which friends would recount a single day’s activities in detail. The long-lost transcript of her 1974 conversation with Hujar was later found and published in 2021 as the book Peter Hujar’s Day, effectively providing a ready-made script for Sachs (one would have to read the book closely to establish just how Sachs has shaped the material).

At the start of the film, we see Hujar addressing Rosenkrantz across a table, a reel-to-reel recorder between them – but this is not a standard interview process, and the situation becomes increasingly informal. Rosenkrantz doesn’t question Hujar, but occasionally interjects wry or encouraging comments, and observes him with a knowing, tender smile. What he says is often fascinating as cultural history (“The phone rings again and it was Susan Sontag”) but just as often banal; for example, accounts of not getting much done in the darkroom or an expedition to buy food. 

The weary twang in Whishaw’s diction brings out the touches of Manhattan hardboiled in Hujar’s persona (he describes “some number who likes to talk tough”). What is remarkable throughout is the intense focus of Hujar’s powers of observation. He notices how much change another diner customer was given, and muses on shades of meaning in a person’s expression or tone of voice. His visit to a wary Allen Ginsberg for a New York Times portrait commission is recounted in meticulous detail, from the first phone call to the payoff, as Ginsberg thaws and offers mischievous advice on how to deal with his next subject, William Burroughs. Hujar’s rambling discourse, though slipping in and out of focus, displays the analytical complexity of a passage of Proust.

Hujar’s day appears to take exactly a day to recount – or so it seems in Sachs’s staging, which ends as night falls. The result is a sense of Hujar reliving his time second by second, with Whishaw’s face folding and shifting in melancholic contemplation, the camera intermittently cutting to Hall’s amused or concerned expressions as Rosenkrantz interjects or simply listens. The film frames its duo in various rooms of Rosenkrantz’s flat (with understated touches of period detail in Stephen Phelps’s design), from living room to kitchen to bedroom, where the duo stretch out, Hujar dreamily laying his head in Rosenkrantz’s lap, then to the rooftop, Manhattan skyline in the background. A sequence of close-up shots, one with Hall gazing straight to camera, offers a still interlude of portraiture, echoing Hujar’s own.

Self-reflexive touches foreground the element of filmed performance, with glimpses of a clapperboard and crew as well as jump cuts, hiccups and flashes in Alex Ashe’s 16mm photography. The rich grain and soft, textured light echo rather than pastiche 60s/70s art cinema, not least the Andy Warhol canon: indeed, Hujar’s discourse is very much in the mode of Warhol’s own conversational fixation on the everyday. 

The film is a response to the perennial question of what artists do all day long – one answer being that they take a lot of phone calls, for this is a flashback to a lost pre-mobile era, when a person’s day could be sabotaged or enriched by unscheduled interruptions from acquaintances or strangers. The result is an undemonstrative but rich contemplation of memory, time and – as shown by the shifting nuances of expression on Rebecca Hall’s face – the pleasures of simply giving someone your undivided attention.