Peter Hujar’s Day (2025): Cast, Plot, Release Date & Where to Watch – A Portrait of Art, Friendship, and New York’s 70s Soul ✨

The world of cinema is about to receive an intimate, hauntingly beautiful gift with Peter Hujar’s Day (2025) — Ira Sachs’s latest biographical drama that transports audiences to New York City in December 1974. Starring Ben Whishaw as the uncompromising photographer Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as writer Linda Rosenkrantz, this film captures a single day in the lives of two artists, unfolding like a cinematic time capsule of creativity, struggle, and uncompromising vision.

As Sachs describes, this is “a film about what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money.” That line alone sets the stage for a raw, poetic meditation on artistry, survival, and the fleeting magic of connection.

🌆 A Day in New York, 1974

Set entirely in Linda Rosenkrantz’s Manhattan apartment, the film immerses us in a single 24-hour conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz. Through their exchanges, we glimpse not just the man behind the camera but also a vibrant, chaotic New York in the 1970s — a city alive with cultural ferment yet equally defined by financial hardship and artistic struggle.

The conversations weave in figures like Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, grounding Hujar in the larger downtown arts scene while also underlining the paradox of being a visionary with limited means. Like a cinematic Bloomsday, the film turns one day into an exploration of life itself, time folding in on itself in richly human detail.

As one character reflects, “Being an artist isn’t about success. It’s about survival with dignity.”

🎭 The Cast and Performances

• Ben Whishaw delivers a masterclass performance as Peter Hujar — tender, fiery, and deeply human. Known for his ability to embody vulnerable complexity, Whishaw brings Hujar’s contradictions to life: his sharp wit, uncompromising ideals, and quiet longing.

• Rebecca Hall anchors the film as Linda Rosenkrantz, not just as an observer but as an intellectual equal whose questions push Hujar to reveal himself. Their dynamic — part friendship, part sparring match — is the heart of the film.

The cast’s intimacy with the material makes the story feel less like a dramatization and more like being dropped into a moment suspended in time.

🎬 Behind the Camera

Directed and written by Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange, Passages), the film is adapted from Rosenkrantz’s 2021 book Peter Hujar’s Day, which documented that exact 24-hour conversation. Originally conceived as a short, Sachs expanded it into a feature that still carries the intimacy of a chamber piece.

Shot by cinematographer Alex Ashe with a minimal, grainy texture evocative of 1970s photography, the film feels like flipping through a contact sheet of Hujar’s life itself. Affonso Gonçalves’s editing allows the dialogue to breathe, honoring silences as much as words.

🏆 Festival Journey and Release

The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 27, drawing acclaim for its restrained elegance and emotional depth. It later screened at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, where it was praised for its “bloomsday-like rumination on an artist’s time.”

Distributed by Janus Films and Sideshow, Peter Hujar’s Day will have its U.S. theatrical release on November 7, 2025.

📺 Where to Watch

• U.S. Theatrical Release: November 7, 2025 (Janus Films & Sideshow)

• Expect eventual streaming availability via Criterion Channel or MUBI, given Janus Films’ distribution history.

🌟 Why You Should Watch

If you loved films like Paterson (2016), My Dinner with Andre (1981), or Love Is Strange (2014), then Peter Hujar’s Day will feel like a cinematic homecoming. It’s not about spectacle but about intimacy — the richness of words, the beauty of a fleeting moment, and the way a single day can hold the essence of an entire life.

“Art is not a career,” Hujar once said. “It’s a way of being.”This film makes that statement feel eternal.