I have no idea why Ben Whishaw’s intimate new movie was made

Ben Whishaw’s revealing character study in Peter Hujar’s Day – premiering at BFI London Film Festival – is nice enough but it’s unclear who it was actually made for.

The snappy feature, coming in at a one-hour 20-minute runtime, is based on the recovered transcript of the famed, and titular, 70s New York photographer who recounted a single day in 1974 in excruciating detail for a book project from writer Linda Rosenkrantz that never came to fruition. 

Originally doomed to be buried by time, this new movie faithfully brings this duo’s playful conversation to life, made more poignant by Hujar’s professed dreams of recognition only afforded to him after his death.

Steeped with casual namedrops, irrelevant tangents and an ever-dwindling day, we are given a grainy snapshot of the booming art scene on the Lower East Side during the heyday of Allen Ginsburg and Fran Lebowitz.

The Paddington star and Sachs have collaborated before on the 2023 film Passages – a widely-praised menage-a-trois imbued with a buzzy pace and unravelling characters that put their foot on the gas and didn’t let go. 

As a follow-up, the quiet, steady hum of Peter Hujar’s Day couldn’t be more different – often to its detriment. 

Portraying the man of the hour -nowadays known as the artist behind A Little Life’s book cover – Whishaw trustily monologues every moment of his 24 hours as he goes about his own day, pottering around the flat with his friend Linda (portrayed by Rebecca Hall).

Kicking off with a visit from a magazine editor, most of Hujar’s morning is made up of phone call after phone call discussing one project or another. It is a testament to Whishaw’s sheer screen presence and witty delivery that anyone in the audience was able to stay engaged. 

There’s no denying that Hujar had an enduring sense of humour, bolstered by a note-perfect performance from the Black Doves actor. The tormented artist’s acerbic anecdotes and sarcastic asides during his retelling are by far and away the best aspect of the whole ordeal. 

At one point, Hujar happily quips that, if this book is to ever be published, he hopes everyone he lists is named – even those he is happily deriding. 

The prolific photographer – caught in the aesthetic thralls of chainsmoking – is delightfully judgmental, passing cynical commentary on all the kooky characters he encounters throughout his day, not least famed poet Allen Ginsburg, who has spent the afternoon photographing for the New York Times. 

There are quiet moments of reflection, sunset shots of the big apple skyline and warm moments of friendship that paint a gorgeously shot portrait – even if the content is lacking.

Yet, his sharp tongue is not enough to save this movie from plummeting into the boring. At times, it felt like being forced to listen to your uncle drone on about a story you simply don’t care about – despite Whishaw’s heroic attempts to revive the source material.

That’s not to say I can’t appreciate the power of this introspective.

As Hujar says multiple times, when tasked with recounting his day in great detail, he hadn’t thought he had done much of anything until he started and soon realised he had a novel’s worth of inconsequential tales.

No doubt that, by the end, you truly do feel as though you have spent the day with him and, for even an hour or so, time-travelled to New York in the 70s, rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of the cultural landscape.

There’s a lesson in there about being present in the moment, appreciating how much you do for yourself without even realising and noticing all the small ways we fill up our days – I’m just not sure we needed to sit through a self-indulgent monologue to learn it. 

For diehard lovers of Peter Hujar, I have no doubt this movie will deliver everything you want and more, in the safe hands of an actor who could probably read the instructions on a medicine leaflet with an arresting whimsy. 

Perhaps, ultimately, the film’s worth as an unfiltered cultural time capsule – a precious commodity in an era of AI misinformation – is enough to justify its very existence.

For everyone else, however, there’s not much pull to this posthumous ode.

Peter Hujar’s Day premieres at the BFI London Film Festival on Friday, October 10. It will be released in UK cinemas on January 2, 2026.

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