The New York Film Festival said Luca Guadagnino’s Queer will be the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, making its U.S.
premiere. The adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Michael Borremans, Andra Ursuta, and David Lowery.
Written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. “Luca Guadagnino is one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, and one of its biggest risk-takers,” said NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. “Queer is his most fearless, inventive, and surprising film, one that brings its subcultural world to brilliant life and creates the role of a lifetime for a tremendous Daniel Craig.” Craig plays Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a heroin user in a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s.
When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he tumbles into a love affair and an odyssey that will take the pair to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high.
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