‘Queer’ Review: Luca Guadagnino Conjures a Psychedelic, Sympathetic Fever Dream of Gay Love and Longing | NYFF

“What else could I say? Everyone is gay.”

Quite an ironic beginning to Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ classic and controversial novel, as the film’s centerpiece thesis is its lead character – an American expat in post-WWII Mexico City – constantly trying to suss out who’s queer and who isn’t in order to know how hard he’ll have to ply them with liquor and flattery in order to bed them.

That lyric, from the Sinead O’Connor cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” plays over the film’s opening credits and while we’ve grown accustomed to slowed down versions of manic rock or pop songs, the deeply plaintive quality of O’Connor’s vocals is a compelling setup for Daniel Craig’s expat William Lee as he searches for connections loose and deep. But Guadagnino isn’t finished with his anachronistic needle drops as the very next one, our true introduction to Lee, comes right after it with yet another Nirvana song, “Come As You Are.” A slow-motion tracking of Craig walking through the streets like the biggest cock of the walk, it’s a throaty, passionate juxtaposition to the intro and certainly of what’s to come.

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 – and I vividly remember reading Queer at 14 or 15, absorbing its frank but largely delicate (by today’s standards) depiction of gay longing and sex. It was adventurous and horny and if you were a gay teenager in a small town in the 1980s there was pretty much nothing better than secretly scouring pages of elicit content, even if it meant hiding it in more palatable material as safe cover. But that was also a titillating aspect, being on the precipice of danger, the fear of real world repercussions if you were caught.

As Burroughs’ alter ego Lee, Craig imbues him with a youthful, lithe energy (not dissimilar to his Belvedere vodka ad from 2022) that attempts to thwart his late 40s, acting as a drunk jester, a moody, center of attention whore and a thoroughly captivating character. It’s a brave, lived-in performance, not for its more graphic gay content (can we please move past this), but for an actor in need of shaking off his James Bond persona so thoroughly. While he hams it up plenty as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out films with his Foghorn Leghorn accent and “well, I do declare!” stuffiness, what he does in Queer is find something deeper and darker. A quick dalliance with a stranger (pop star Omar Apollo in a very…revealing role) proves to be one of Lee’s many temporary and transactional relationships. 

We find our story early and often at Ship Ahoy, the local watering hole for queers to wet their whistle for booze and whet their appetite for men led by another expat, the cunty, Capote-esque John Dumé (the fabulously funny Drew Droege), Lee’s main challenger in the daddy-son Olympics and good friend Joe, a short. hairy, round and unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman (who resembles something between Allen Ginsberg and Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder). Schwartzman is a scream here, regaling the bar with stories of being robbed or fooled by tricks and johns, stealing everything from his books to his socks. Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritizkes provides the screenplay adaptation here, keeping most of the book’s raw dialogue even if he sands down much of Lee’s overt racism throughout the story.

Enter Eugene Allerton, played by the impossibly handsome Drew Starkey (Outer Banks), a fresh-faced 21-year-old (age gappers, you can leave now), an ex-military college student inspired by Burroughs’ paramour Adelbert Lewis Marker with high-waisted slacks and perfectly pressed shirts courtesy of Jonathan Anderson, creative director of LOEWE and costume designer for Guadagnino’s Challengers. Sitting in the corner, back to the wall, his quiet observation of Lee and Dumé and other queers and queens fighting for a line in the queue gives him an unachievable status. For any gay man who’s ever been preoccupied or even obsessed with a “straight” man, especially a queer-baiting one, the hunt is real. The goal you’ll never reach even if the game is fun to play. For Lee, his desperation for Allerton’s gaze reaches comical levels but Allerton relents. Is it for money? Boredom? Is he really gay? He actively spends time with hot redhead Mary, playing chess and carrying on in front of Lee and all of his potential male suitors, taunting them and making the hunger even more palpable.

But Allerton isn’t cruel, he’s rather sympathetic and kind to Lee. “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” Lee says at one point and indeed, in one of the film’s early moments of magical realism, the pair are watching Cocteau’s ghostly masterpiece Orpheus and as he looks at Allerton, Lee’s desire to touch him turns him into an apparition himself. I was reminded more than once of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, another gorgeous ghost story about chasing our past in an unseeable future. But the relationship does become very physical, but there are no peaches here. Craig and Starkey devour each other in sweaty, sloppy carnality and it’s clear that Guadagnino probably felt the sting of the negative comments made about his pan away from sex in Call My By Your Name because he addresses that moment more than directly here. Call it Boners and All. Musical collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross supply the film’s score, largely deviating from the pulsating beats of Challengers, opting for traditionally romantic strings and horns to great effect, intertwined with even more wild song choices from the likes of New Order and Prince.

But Lee has more than sex on his mind. He becomes myopically obsessed with traveling to South America in search of yagé (aka ayahuasca) in hopes of forming a telepathy to contact his dead common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, a wife he himself killed in a drug-induced game of William Tell, shooting her in head (a memory that rears its ugly head here). Burroughs was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide as he wrote the novel. “When I wrote Junkie, I feel I was being written in Queer,” he said. Through drug withdrawals and a twice-a-week routine of sex, Allerton agrees to accompany Lee on this Indiana Jones adventure, seeking out scientists in Ecuador and ultimately, Lesley Manville as a botanist turned jungle voodoo priestess in an absolute looney tunes performance. It’s here that Guadagnino really lets loose as Lee and Allerton imbibe on the native plant and take a psychedelic journey of the body and mind, at times literally melding into one, replete with interpretive dance. It’s Twin Peaks by Powell and Pressburger and it’s the surrealness that gives us our most grounded look at Lee and the chemistry between Craig and Starkey sizzles with beauty, sadness and surreal sexual transmogrification.

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. He understands longing and compulsion but also compassion. He, with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (their fourth collaboration), understands the difference between sexuality and sensuality. That in a film filled with horny proclivities the most erotic moment can be the flash of a bicep and armpit hair in a tight white t-shirt. Production designer Stefano Baisi, working entirely on sets built in Italy’s famed Cinecittà Studios creates a world (often through shockingly good miniatures) of a reality that never seems completely real, keeping us on the edge of even knowing ourselves.

Luca Guadagnino has created a stunning adaptation of a nearly impossible to film story, curating a provocative culmination of the director’s work, a showcase for Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey and quite possibly, a place where Burroughs and his ghosts can finally rest. As a friend. As an old memoria.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 New York Film Festival, A24 will release Queer in select theaters on November 27.