Peter Hujar’s Day Review: Being Alive

In his first feature since 2023’s electric pas de trois Passages, Ira Sachs enlists Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in a most curious experiment that somehow avoids coming off like a gimmick. A slim two-hander, Peter Hujar’s Day dramatizes a 1974 conversation between the writer Linda Rosenkrantz and her friend, acclaimed photographer Peter Hujar, conducted for a project Rosenkrantz eventually discarded, in which she asked creative figures to document everything that happened to them the day before.

Over the course of their conversation at Linda’s apartment, Peter goes into painstaking detail, some of it surely inscrutable to a 2025 audience. (Amusingly, the press kit includes bios for the nearly 50 New York art & intelligentsia scenesters whose names are dropped throughout the day’s accounting.) Peter dishes on phone calls from Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz, moans about an uninspiring photo shoot with Allen Ginsberg, and recounts what he ordered for dinner and how much it cost. Occasionally Linda asks followup questions: When Peter mentions watering the plants, she wants to know if he owns a watering can. No, he replies, he uses the coffee pot, but he fills it up in the bathtub because the pressure is better there. It’s perfectly charming, the poetry of the prosaic.

Though the dialogue is sourced directly from the transcript of the real-life conversation (published in 2022, 35 years after Hujar’s tragically early death to AIDS), Sachs and his so very game leads do take some liberties with the material. It’s barely an hourlong conversation but it stretches out like a cat, as day passes into night passes into day, with several deliciously 70s-specific wardrobe changes to boot. (The production design, too, is first-rate; the whole thing looks and feels like a lost film discovered in a dusty vault owned by distributor Janus Films.) It all makes for a fascinating interplay, between photorealism and an artifice that is baked into the very first frame, when an offscreen camera crew goes through the usual “quiet on set” paces that end with a satisfying thwack of a film slate. 

Sachs leans into the artier instincts of his best films, Passages and Keep the Lights On. The camera is unobtrusive, minimal in its movements. Sometimes the camera only catches half a face. Sometimes the actors walk in and out of frame. They break to dance. They move to the bed and cuddle. Peter smokes endless cigarettes, and Linda worries over him – he’s not eating enough. A boom mic enters the frame, puncturing the pretend of it all. Three times the conversation stops for a bit of non-diagetic music, a Mozart requiem. I think I caught the meaning: That there is something sacred to this process, of excavating meaning from our days and even on occasion mining art from it. Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

This article appears in November 14 • 2025.