Brilliant, audacious author meets brilliant, audacious director… It takes risk to translate the work of William S. Burroughs for the screen, but Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME) spin on the Beat legend’s autobiographical novel matches its source material in vulnerability and taboo-smashing adventurousness. Starring Daniel Craig and featuring supporting turns from Jason Schwartzman and Lesley Manville, QUEER is a hallucinogenic odyssey bathed in desire.
Lee (Craig) mingles with the expatriate set in postwar Mexico City, wandering its streets, frequenting its gay bars, and ingesting whatever illicit substances are available. He is a consummate raconteur who has no trouble finding an audience, but he is also a desperately lonely, middle-aged addict with an alarming fondness for guns. Early in QUEER, Lee sets his sights on a journey to the Amazon in search of the potentially telepathic ayahuasca — and he wants handsome young bi-curious Oklahoman Allerton (Drew Starkey, THE HATE U GIVE) to accompany him. Their travels will yield a string of unexpected encounters and provide Lee with sobering lessons in what Burroughs dubbed “the algebra of need.”
Adapted by Justin Kuritzkes (who wrote Guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS), QUEER is both faithful to the book and a radical re-imagining. Period detail is offset by anachronistic musical choices, while an eerie epilogue alludes to the real-life tragedy that prompted Burroughs’ writing career. Through it all, Craig makes Lee his own, creating a fully lived-in protagonist whose unruly obsessions lead to something akin to enlightenment.
“Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing…. It’s hard to think of a more ideal director than Guadagnino to explore queerness, sensuality and the shifting terrain of romantic intoxication, and he’s found the perfect traveling companion in Daniel Craig.” —David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter “How lucky are we to be around at the same time that Luca Guadagnino is doing his thing? The Italian director has delivered some of the boldest and most uncompromising works of the last decade…. Star Daniel Craig is downright sensational in what proves to be a transformative role, initially playing on our expectations of his world-famous James Bond performance before gleefully tearing those assumptions apart over the course of its 135-minute runtime.” —Jeremy Mathai, Slash Film “Daniel Craig, shifting about a dozen gears from James Bond, doesn’t make the mistake of impersonating the older William Burroughs who became a punk icon in the ’80s…. This is Burroughs before he got famous, when he was just…a man, pursuing what his instincts told him to. Craig makes him a nasty, witty literary dog laced with vulnerability.” —Owen Gleiberman, Variety “Leaves you…alive and awake to the powers and possibilities of cinema to find humanity in even the darkest recesses of a person.” —Ryan Lattanizio, IndieWire
