First ‘Queer’ Trailer Gives Us Passionate Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, Ghostly Love and Sinead O’Connor

Today, A24 released the first trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey.

Written by Challengers scribe Justin Kuritzkes and adapted from the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, Queer finds middle-aged American expat William Lee (Craig) in Mexico City just after World War II, as he pursues the much younger Eugene Allerton (Starkey), fresh out of the military and using up his GI benefits.

This first look is set to Sinead O’Connor’s stirring cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” (which also opens the film) as Lee aims and fails to impress Allerton, to the derision of the denizens of the local expat bar. The trailer highlights the film’s surreal, ghostly and dreamlike sequences, with a design of full size set pieces and miniatures shot entirely at Rome’s Cinecettà Studios, raw sexuality, an unrecognizable Lesley Manville and an equally unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman.

When Burroughs wrote Queer in the early 1950s he was coming off the commercial success of his semi-autobiographical short novel Junkie, still in the throes of his addiction to heroin and morphine and that craving spilled fully into this next semi-autobiographical venture while delving into his sexuality more than before and to an extent which held the novel’s publication for more than 30 years. Coming out in 1985, there was a resurgence at the time of the Beat Poet generation’s work from that era – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the like, making for a perfectly timed release.

Queer had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September then came over to North America to show at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival. In the NYFF review, I said of the film, “I’d be hard pressed to think of anyone other than Luca Guadagnino to be as perfect for this material as he is at this point in his career” and “the chemistry between Craig and Starkey sizzles with beauty, sadness and surreal sexual transmogrification.”

Queer opens in limited release from A24 on November 27. Here is the first trailer and posters.