Thoughts on Peter Hujar's Day

   On Criterion, I watched a 2025 biographical drama titled Peter Hujar's Day, written and directed by Ira Sachs, based on the 2021 book of the same name by Linda Rosenkrantz. It's likely because of my own close ties to NYC, though I grew up in Long Island. But I'm 42, lived in NYC for twenty years, and now live in Jersey City but commute to Manhattan for work. So it's still always been very close to me.

    The film was taken from the transcript of a lost-to-time audio recording that writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) made while interviewing her friend, photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) on a December day in his downtown NYC apartment in 1974, asking him about all of his activities from the day before. Peter is a successful photographer whose work had been in The New York Times and The Village Voice, but is often broke and just getting by, chasing down people to get paid for his work, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and chain-smoking cigarettes in his apartment. He sits with Linda as he smokes and talks about tracking down Allen Ginsburg to photograph him for the Times, finding contrast between his chanting and Eastern religion vibes and then being crude about William S. Burroughs' proclivities for prep school boys in neckties; acting as the go-between for Susan Sontag and another artist friend; and making his way through the loose artsy bohemian world of friends and friends of friends. Linda just listens and doesn't judge and is very understanding and not surprised by anything.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. I liked how Hall and Whishaw, two British actors, nailed this 1960s-1970s liberal intellectual NYC accent that I can't describe how it sounds, but is the kind of voice heard in 1970s Woody Allen movies. The language is dated in a 1960s book kind of way, like saying "we were making it on the couch" for sex. The film has this quiet cozy vibe to me, that I felt relaxed just watching two excellent actors play the kind of New Yorkers of a bygone era, that now really exists with the kind of elderly New Yorkers who have lived in their rent-controlled apartments for over 50 years and have tons of books in tall bookcases and a lot of old-school charm to them.