When I look at Peter Hujar’s portrait of poet Allen Ginsburg, taken on December 18, 1974, it’s strikingly nonchalant. Ginsberg is standing on the sidewalk, one hand in pocket and the other looped through the straps of a bag draped on his shoulder. He’s looking right down the barrel of the lens with an “okay, you’re taking my picture” expression on his face. Ginsberg is perhaps the most recognizable name to come out of the beat generation of poets but he looks like he could be anybody––he could be your buddy Carl. It was taken for the New York Times but certainly doesn’t have the gloss and sophistication of celebrity portraits we see in major publications today. The austere street beside him is on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood now flooded with tourists, boutiques, and banality. Just as Hujar’s photo is indicative of an era of artistic renaissance in New York City, so is Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day.
In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz began a project where she asked her artist friends to describe, in detail, what they did for an entire day because, she says, “I feel like I don’t do much of anything.” These conversations were recorded for a book that never came to be. The tapes were lost but a transcript of Rosenkrantz’s conversation with Hujar was found at the Morgan Library and a book, with the same title as Sachs’ film, was published in 2021. The director began planning an adaptation with Ben Whishaw while filming the director’s previous feature Passages.
Let’s make something clear: the 76-minute runtime of Peter Hujar’s Day comprises a conversation between two people mostly set in an apartment. While that may seem confining, Sachs manages to keep the frame dynamic without distracting from the engaging performances of Whishaw as Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Linda Rosenkrantz. What results is an intimate encapsulation of a queer artist’s life from a bygone era of creative vibrancy.
An entire day passes in Linda’s apartment as Peter recounts what he did the previous day, from the time he wakes, to the two naps he takes, to when he goes to sleep. He describes what he ate (more liverwurst sandwiches than you’d guess), what projects he worked on, and his many phone calls and interactions with luminaries of the day as well as the kinds of people on the street you observe and continue to ponder for one reason or another––all while chain-smoking.
Their conversation moves from room to room, Peter and Linda growing physically closer as the day goes on. Whishaw is remarkably natural in his performance, delivering the 55 pages of dialogue as if he was divining his own past. While Hall has a fraction of the lines, credit is due to her ability to make listening look interesting as she gazes with bright-eyed fascination. They change positions and locations throughout, avoiding the visual monotony seen in My Dinner with Andre, another feature-length conversation. Sachs frames the two like the portraiture of a still camera. He breaks up the conversation with interstitial montages and a full-on rockabilly dance break that act as palate-cleansers.
Whishaw and Hall’s performances, the detailed costuming, set design, and square aspect ratio all contribute to Sachs’s successful attempt at verisimilitude. The lack of rehearsal for the two actors permits an inherent naturalism––Peter Hujar’s Day looks and feels like it’s capturing a casual conversation between friends in 1974.
The amount of phone calls Peter receives is a reminder of how differently we communicate with each other. His phone rang about the same amount of times one gets a text message today. I thought about how much more pleasant it was to pick up the phone and hear a friend’s voice. Though, unlike me, the people on the other end of the line included: Susan Sontag, Glenn O’Brien, Fran Liebowitz, and Allen Ginsburg, whom he met up with that day to take the photograph described above. There isn’t an air of name-dropping when he evokes these figures; they are his contemporaries, his friends, his fellow bohemians in the community that used to be able to thrive at a time before originality was priced-out of lower Manhattan.
His descriptions certainly indulge in the prosaic, like when he describes that he waters his plants using a coffee pot he fills up in the tub because it’s quicker, but there is the historical charm of hearing that he remembered to bring a penny with him because cigarettes cost 56 cents. Peter tells Linda about the Chinese food he picked up that night as well as what someone else there ordered (chicken chow mein) and how much it cost ($3.45).
These mundane details are part of the humanity of Peter as an artist and a person. He’s open about his need to make money and how he thinks his work should be presented. They also create a dynamic spectrum when he talks about a musician made up by a record company as a publicity stunt named Topaz Caucasian.
Sachs’ films explore the artistic process (filmmaking in Passages, painting in Love is Strange). After picking up the book of the transcript, Sachs said he connected with the depiction of an artist’s life. It wasn’t extravagant, but rich and relatable. Peter Hujar’s Day ends up an interesting exercise in blending documentary with performance and a slice-of-life that crystalizes the tiny quotidian details that get filtered out as time goes on.
I later thought about how much time I’ve spent listening to podcasts of far less interesting people detailing their days. I also challenged myself to see how much I would be able to remember from the previous day. I concluded it was nowhere as detailed, which led to a list of questions I’m still reconciling.
Peter Hujar’s Day premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.