Daniel Craig delivers possibly his best screen performance for director Luca Guadagnino in what is nonetheless one of the former Bond star’s least interesting and most ill-disciplined movies (and that’s including Cowboys & Aliens).
Guadagnino, hot from the flawless Challengers, has reunited with that film’s writer Justin Kuritzkes to adapt Queer, the patchy, repetitive, quasi-autobiographical and originally abandoned novel by Beat Generation icon William S Burroughs.
Nothing, alas, ages faster than hepcat recalcitrance, daddio, where countercultural activities such as drinking excessively, taking drugs, and being gay are subjects in themselves, and almost completely devoid of overarching narrative form.
It’s why previous Beatnik flicks such as On the Road, Howl, Big Sur and The Last Time I Committed Suicide have mostly struggled. Because, apparently, storytelling is for squares, man. These films just want to, like, y’know, hang.
• Daniel Craig on James Bond, sex and Queer: ‘Am I pushing it too far?
And so Craig is cast as Burroughs stand-in William Lee, a heroin-addicted barfly with a sweaty side-parting and randy yearning for the handsome young American men who patronise the Ship Ahoy saloon in mid-1950s Mexico City.
Lee is needy, clingy, brittle, annoying and slightly predatory in a turn of beguiling intensity and command from Craig. Indeed it is a testament to his audacity as a performer, and his healthy interest in upending the hyper-macho legacy of Bond, that the 56-year-old is willing to play such a sleazy, unsavoury character, one who gives other men the creeps. “I can’t stand to be alone with him,” says one of the Ship Ahoy drinkers, early on. “He keeps trying to go to bed with me.”
Luckily for Lee, he soon meets the gorgeous and yet whoppingly blank student Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, seemingly catatonic) and essentially browbeats him into a relationship. And so begins a lethargic, circular and substance-addicted saunter around smoky Mexican bars and midnight motels, one that eventually concludes in the jungles of Ecuador, where Lee is desperate to sample some ayahuasca in the hope that it will confer upon him the powers of telepathy.
It’s visually appealing, obviously, because Guadagnino does not make ugly films. But it’s difficult to convey how little, dramatically speaking, is happening here. Kuritzkes is slavishly faithful to the novel, minus the controversial sequence where Lee is pleasured by a gang of 12- to 14-year-old boys.
He also adds a closing set piece that refers to the fatal 1951 shooting of Joan Vollmer by Burroughs in a “William Tell stunt gone wrong”. It’s so tantalising and, yes, dramatic, that it will leave most audiences stumbling furiously out into the foyer, howling in protest, “Why didn’t we get a movie about that?”
★★☆☆☆
18, 137min
In cinemas now
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