Systems of Measurement
On Peter Hujar’s Day
There is a moment in Ira Sach’s new film when Peter Hujar, played by Ben Whishaw, lights a cigarette and describes choosing a jacket to wear down to the Lower East Side. He’s headed a few blocks south to photograph Allen Ginsburg for The New York Times; and, weighing his options, tells us he settled on a red ski jacket, which felt appropriately edgy for both the stated mission and its setting. He speaks fluidly and eloquently, using the cigarette like punctuation as he recounts, in a flat, droll tone, walking over to the poet’s apartment. Collapsing magic with the mundane, it incapsulates the films wider reverence for the minutiae of how we fill our days.
The dialogue is ripped near direct from a conversation between Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, who, in 1974, asked him over to tell her everything he had done day prior; but the film takes marvelous visual liberties with the where and how of it all. As Peter lapses in and out his own recollections, he and Linda — played by the actress Rebecca Hall — move through her sundrenched Yorkville living room, to her windswept rooftop, to the corner of her bedroom, captured teetering on the edge of greyscale in the fading daylight. Hours aredemarcated through repeated rituals: the duo keeps coming back to the dining table, where food and its consumption (never a meal, just a series of snacks) mark the passage of a liquid, loose kind of time. Slices of cheese, cuts of fruit, pieces of toast smeared with chocolate spread: they eat to satiate, in order to be able to continue to talk.
The film has two subjects: the first being the friendship between Linda and Peter, and the second, perhaps more interesting, being the dignity of time uninterrupted. This is a movie about the intimacy of idleness. An ode to the reciprocal gift of allocating a day for mutual self-determination, bracketing off time to enter a creative space with a creative partner, to go wherever it may lead without constriction or restraint.
If lately, it often feels that culture is being retrofitted to meet a demand rather than organically arriving at itself, then Peter Hujar’s Day offers a model antidote. Everything about the film seems to suggest that the key to creativity is time enough for true consideration; that insofar as one aspires to leading a creative life, a life of agency and presence, the same is required. Part of its medicine is its nostalgia. The world comes to us packaged in the elegant and enviable interior of Linda’s apartment. Each shot is bathed in the warm, grainy light of film; cut together with subtle jolts and jumps that break narrative continuity only to reinforce the overall atmosphere of the film itself. Cell phones are notably absent, leaving trains of thought to run continuous, uninterrupted; the whereabouts of the protagonists a delicious secret. It cuts a cross section out of the art world we like to imagine, a not-so-distant but perhaps never fully actualized past when it might have been possible to stroll through the East Village knowing which stoop belonged to which artist. So in this way, the film also trades in our dreams. It is shot through rose colored glasses.
Still, I walked from it away newly interested in how easily we can catch ourselvestreating this kind of innocent companionship like a luxury, and thinking about the beauty that is born when creativity is allowed to run its course as simply an end in and of itself rather than a dot on a path to somewhere else. x
February 2026
Cover images: Still from Peter Hujar’s Day, directed by Ira Sachs, 2025; AM Homes, “What Happens at Chateau Marmont...” Published in The FT: How to Spend It, February 21st, 2025.