Have you ever wondered what it’s like to spend a day in the mind of an artist who sees the world…well, differently? One particular artist who grapples with hunger, exhaustion, and the constant hum of ambition, while trying to make New York his stage, his canvas, and sometimes, his cage? Peter Hujar’s Day, American filmmaker Ira Sachs’s 2025 bio-drama, invites us to do exactly that, and in a way that’s unexpectedly comforting.
Premiering at Sundance in January, the film follows the celebrated photographer Peter Hujar, played with the usual magnetism by Ben Whishaw. Over the course of approximately 75 minutes, we are offered a window into Hujar’s life in the 1970s East Village, a city that mirrors, uncannily, the trials of artists living in any metropolis today: the struggle for workspace and to get paid at all, the improvisation required to survive and fix the heater at night, and the fragile tightrope between commercial necessity and artistic integrity. Rebecca Hall co-stars, portraying Linda Rosencrantz, Hujar’s confidante, listener, and collaborator in a story that unfolds largely through Hujar’s monologue.
The film’s foundation is as fascinating as its subject. In the early 1970s, Rosencrantz recorded conversations with friends about their daily lives, hoping to transform them into a book. Hujar’s reflections on his own day, captured in these snippets of conversations, eventually became the basis for a modern-day novel – and, in turn, for Sachs’ adaptation. According to interviews, Sachs first stumbled upon the book randomly in a bookstore, devoured it in a café, and spent years shaping it into the film we now see. Remarkably, much of the original tape-recorded material was lost; what survived was a typed transcript and the book.
A Monologue That Is As Honest As Painful
Here’s a challenge few filmmakers attempt: a feature-length film built on a near-monologue. Out of 58 or 59 script pages, 55 belong almost entirely to Hujar. It’s not just dialogue; it’s breath, movement, thought, and performance all at once. The monologue explores Hujar’s professional and personal life: from his anxieties about health, eyesight, malnutrition, to the looming threat of AIDS, which would claim his life at 53-while balancing reflections on creative ambition and friendship.
Rebecca Hall’s Linda, mostly an active listener, brings warmth, subtle humor, and grounding to the story. Their chemistry, built over the course of filming, is the emotional core of the movie. There’s a scene, gentle yet intimate, where Hujar lightly touches Hall’s crossed legs while laying on a bed in a warmly lit room. It’s not dramatic, not performative, just a human connection, real and tender, and it lingers long after the film ends – actually, it is the artwork for the movie.
The Artist, the City, and the Struggle
Peter Hujar’s early life was far from easy. Abandoned by his father before birth and raised by Ukrainian grandparents on a farm, he eventually moved with his mother to New York after his grandmother died in 1946. That household, too, was fraught with difficulty. By 16, Hujar had already run away, determined to be independent and show it to the world. He entered the School of Industrial Art, trained under masters like Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, and by his early twenties was creating photographs that were technically remarkable and deeply empathetic. A Fulbright scholarship later took him to Italy, where he documented the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, a haunting juxtaposition that would echo decades later in his book of portraits of cultural icons such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Susan Sontag.
Hujar’s path was paved with “bold decisions” only a few would dare to make. By the late 1960s, he abandoned commercial work to focus entirely on artistic photography, often exploring themes of homosexuality and identity in his work. While his 1973 book Portraits in Life and Death achieved modest success, it wasn’t until a reissue in 2024 that the world fully recognized its significance. Peter Hujar’s Day captures both this unrecognized brilliance and the constant tension between survival and artistic pursuit in New York City: a tension that still resonates with artists trying to make a life in the city today.
A Space Transformed
One of the film’s most remarkable aspects is how it was shot. The apartment, a generously spaced unit provided by a local artist residency program, became the filmmakers’ cinematic “playground”. Sachs used the space, light, colors, choreography and textures to create an intimate, tactile New York experience. Cinematographer Alex Ashe, known for The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, crafts images that feel luminous and immediate. The film was shot on 16mm celluloid, a choice that blasts us with texture, warmth, and a subtle grain reminiscent of Hujar’s own photography. The camera’s movement is precise yet organic, often tracing the actors’ shifts in space with a choreography that reflects both the narrative and Hujar’s inner life.
The set design, largely contributed by Sachs and Stephen Phelps, adds authenticity. Furniture from Hujar’s apartment or in the style of his era populates the spacious apartment, grounding the film in reality while allowing the performances to breathe. There’s a beautiful interplay of stylized sequences, almost like stills being captured, as Hujar and Linda occasionally pause, pose, or simply inhabit a moment, with classic opera playing in the background, reminding us of the power of observation and photography.
Moments of Humor and Humanity
Despite its focus on monologue and artistic struggle, the film is often light-hearted (not unlike everyday life). Hujar speaks candidly about life’s little absurdities: low water pressure in his apartment, heating failures, or improvising with a coffee pot to water his plants. He recounts photographing Allen Ginsberg in front of burnt-out buildings, commenting on the eccentricities of the Lower East Side, and reflecting on the bizarre camaraderie among artists of his era, how neighbors would drop by unannounced, share a pizza, or borrow his bathtub for a quick bath because they had no hot water. These moments are both hilarious and heartbreaking, revealing the tenderness of human connection, the resilience required to live as an artist in the city – and the sense of community we have pretty much lost by today.
Ben Whishaw carries the film with almost heroic skill. His Hujar is tense, restless, anxiously loving and palpably alive, someone balancing genius and fragility, humor and despair. Hall’s Linda provides a counterpoint, listening, grounding, and gently nudging the narrative – and her friend – forward. Some moments of acting feel a bit too heightened, perhaps exaggerated for effect. Sachs smartly uses jump cuts and changes of scene; kitchen, rooftop, bed, and street, to maintain visual rhythm and keep the viewer engaged, sometimes the movie made me feel like I was part of a promenade stage production.
Why It Matters Today
Peter Hujar’s Day is more than a biopic or a film about a photographer. It’s a meditation on (artistic) friendship, dedication, and survival, and it resonates profoundly in modern times too. Artists today still navigate similar hurdles: financial insecurity, professional burnout, creative ambition, and the challenge of sustaining human connections in an often isolating urban-digital environment. Watching Hujar’s day unfold, you feel seen, understood, and oddly comforted. There’s a sense of shared experience across decades, a reminder that while technology, gentrification, and social media change the city, the core struggles of creative life and human life remain strikingly familiar.
Peter Hujar’s Day is now playing in cinemas, so if you can, grab a ticket and experience it on the big screen. Hopefully it will soon appear on MUBI or another arthouse-friendly streaming platform, because let’s be honest, this isn’t exactly the kind of movie Netflix would rush to snap up.
~ by Dora Endre ~
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