‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Is the Modest Sleeper Hit of Sundance 2025
Sundance 2025 will be remembered as what’s probably the penultimate year that film festival calls Park City home, as well as the edition that gave us a body-horror rom-com (IRL couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco’s gloriously disgusting Together), an introduction to a major new triple-threat talent (Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby), a pastoral look at the stoic 20th century everymen who made our country (Train Dreams), and a whole lotta music docs. But for us, this Sundance will always be the one where we got to eavesdrop on two artists discussing the quotidian details of boho life in a Lower East Side apartment, with only the late-afternoon light and the sounds of New York to keep them company.
Directed by Sundance veteran Ira Sachs, Peter Hujar’s Day 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. On December 19th, 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz invited her friend, photographer Peter Hujar, over to her apartment. She’d been percolating on the idea of recording chats with a number of art-world luminaries she ran with, and Hujar was one of her initial subjects. The focus would be on whatever the person did the previous day.
Over several hours, the two discuss the magnificent and the mundane, who they both knew and what they’d recently seen, whether Peter had watered the plants and if the Vogue editor dropping by for pics was a real editor. (She wasn’t aware of the rates for Hujar’s pics of Lauren Hutton, which seemed more than a little suspicious.) A long anecdote about shooting Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times is given the Homeric epic treatment; it resulted in this portrait. Gossip is exchanged. Names are dropped: Ed Baynard, Glenn O’Brien, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, the Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg. They dance to Tennessee Jim’s rockabilly ditty “Hold Me Tight.” Occasionally, the duo take the talk outside so they could have a quick smoke.
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The book project never came to fruition, and the tape was lost. But in 2019, a written transcript of their back and forth was discovered at the Morgan Library, tucked away in Hujar’s archives. The audio was permanently AWOL. Only the words remained.
Sachs takes this transcript and, along with co-conspirators Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall (gamely attempting a Bronx-honk accent), stages their conversation in all of its commonplace and sometimes catty glory; occasionally, he allows a quick shot of a slate, a camera crew and a boom mic to intrude in to the frame, reminding you that this is as much an act of creation as it is recreation. It’s a talking picture, in the truest sense of the word, but it’s also a time machine. Step into the film’s excavation of a lost world filled with intellectuals and downtown scenesters and loitering Beat legends and art lovers and ex-lovers, all perched on the edge of a spirit-of-’74 Horror City jackhammering and bleating outside their windows, and you’ll want to stay for in it. This is superior Hangout Cinema 101. The movie runs 76 minutes. It could have been four times as long.
Call it a love letter as well, penned with undying admiration and possibly a soupçon of nostalgia but not an ounce of sentimentality, for a New Yawk that may as well be the Victorian era. The era itself comes through in the funky-ass outfits Hall wears — we’re assuming this takes place over more than a day, given the change of couture and shifts from day to dusk to night — the books on the shelves, the reel-to-reel recorder that’s the third corner of the film’s Platonic love triangle and the decor. It’s so ambitious in its attempt to channel that particular moment, yet so modest in every other aspect, even the performances; both Whishaw and Hall forego showiness for a quiet, shorthand-filled take on these old bohemian pals. The movie simply wants to pay respect to their in-jokes and kvetching and observations. You feel lucky you get to ride along.
Sachs is more than capable of ginning up complex productions, whether he’s peering into the lifestyles of the rich and infamous (Forty Shades of Blue, which on the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance back in 2005), the tortured history of a tortuous relationship (2012’s Keep the Lights On), or the whirling center of a narcissistic vortex (2023’s Passages). But he’s an expert at dialing things back and letting the flow of a dialogue simply happen, and the joy of Peter Hujar’s Day is the joy of being able to listen along. This deceptively dense movie may be the sleeper hit of this festival. It’s such a joy.