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‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Review: Ben Whishaw Plays the Noted New York Photographer in Ira Sachs’ Magical 1974 Time Capsule of a Movie
It's based on a transcript of Hujar's's description of what he did on one day, which in the film becomes anything but ordinary.
The always astonishing Ben Whishaw plays the sweet, morose, gay, chain-smoking, furtively sincere, faraway-eyed Hujar, a veteran freelance photographer who was just coming into his own as a gallery artist and downtown scenester. He talks, with a note of wry jadedness, about the money he’s owed for various freelance assignments, about wanting to go back to sleep at 10:15 a.m. (just because he can), about talking on the phone to Susan Sontag, about buying Oscar Meyer Braunschweiger to make a sandwich, about a concocted person named Topaz Caucasian who everyone thought was real, about more conversations (with Vince Aletti and Lisa Robinson and Glenn O’Brien), and about finally heading over to the Lower East Side to visit Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, where taking his portrait for the Times proves to be an ordeal. He rants about the corporations running everything, and about the New York Times; he also tells Hujar that he should offer to service William S. Burroughs sexually in order to take a better shot of him.
Or read this on Variety
