The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs (Passages). Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Sachs’s film is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors. With this engrossing and wholly unexpected film, Sachs shuttles us back to a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene that lives on in words as much as images.

“This is a movie you want to live inside… Sachs has found an impeccably in-sync collaborator in Ben Whishaw that he should not let go of any time soon.” Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

“Ingenious… Ben Whishaw plays Hujar, whose account of his life spotlights the piquant idiosyncrasies of Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and other eminences.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“The modest sleeper hit … Takes an extended conversation between talented, creative friends and elevates it to the realm of both first-rate voyeurism and the second-hand high of reliving a lost era… The joy of PETER HUJAR’S DAY is the joy of being able to listen along.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone

“A MASTERPIECE. Consisting of a conversation between two people in an East Village apartment, filmed austerely but evocatively, the picture revels in its spareness, its warm simplicity.”
– Bilge Ebiri, Vulture