The jazzy experimental style of the Beat Generation writers has made their work notoriously tricky to adapt for the screen. Walter Salles’ On the Road, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch took stabs at it with varying degrees of success. John Krokidas’ under-appreciated Kill Your Darlings arguably came closer to capturing the rebellious energy of the literary movement by tracing a formative episode in the lives of the writers themselves. In Queer, Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing.

Working again with Justin Kuritzkes, his screenwriter on Challengers, Guadagnino paints an evocative picture of ex-pat ennui in post-World War II Mexico City, establishing the foundations of a love story grounded in realism before shifting into fantasy as the narrative becomes a drug-addled mosaic. The film was acquired ahead of its Venice premiere by A24, which is planning a release later this year.

Written in the early ‘50s while Burroughs was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, but not published until 1985, the novel is practically a memoir, given how closely it hews to events in the author’s diaries and letters.

The book sits squarely between Junkie and Naked Lunch in chronicling the experiences with opioid addiction of Burroughs’ alter ego, William Lee. But Queer perhaps is the most revealing of the three books about the writer himself, depicting Lee’s unraveling, possessed by desire and corrosive need. The object of that obsession is Eugene Allerton, a fresh-faced American ex-military kid inspired by Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was 21 when he and Burroughs met.

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. In a transfixing performance that balances colorful affectation with raw hunger, the actor makes Lee a magnetic raconteur whose shield of worldly composure falls away as Eugene (Drew Starkey) eludes his grasp, leaving him a virtual ghost by the end of the film.

In Mexico City to escape charges of heroin possession in the U.S., Lee indulges his drug habit with whatever he can get, while trying to write but more often spending time strolling the streets, drinking in a charged atmosphere of brothels and cock fights and bars captured in granular panoramic splendor by DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.

Aside from some second-unit work, the movie was shot entirely at Cinecittà, with sets constructed on the historic Rome studio backlot. (Queer marks the second major film this year to recreate Mexico on European soundstages, following Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.)

Lee is a fixture at the Ship Ahoy bar, floating among the queer American ex-patriate community but maintaining a real friendship seemingly only with Joe, who’s unwilling to give up his taste for rough trade over anything as inconsequential as getting assaulted or robbed. Played by an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman, Joe could almost be an Allen Ginsberg surrogate, spinning low-key hilarious accounts of his sexual adventures. When a dalliance with a cop turns sour and he finds “El Puto Gringo” scrawled on an exterior wall of his home, he shrugs, “I left it there. It pays to advertise.”

Lee pulls his share of young tricks, both Americans and Mexicans, but when lanky, bespectacled Eugene catches his eye on the street, he’s bewitched. At first, their flirtatious glances are a playful cat-and-mouse game. Lee strikes out in his initial attempts to connect, but Eugene gradually starts fraternizing with him at bars.

They go to a movie theater to see Cocteau’s Orpheus, where Guadagnino finds a gorgeous visual translation for Burroughs’ description of Lee as he imagines caressing and kissing Eugene, with “ectoplasmic fingers” and “phantom thumbs.” Also lifted directly from the novel is a moving image soon after, when Lee in his mind leans in close to the younger man, appearing “curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face.”

Though the connection does eventually extend to the physical, it’s more a question of Lee servicing Eugene and the latter surprising him by reciprocating, albeit with impersonal detachment. While Eugene is sufficiently bi-curious to express interest in the gay bars around town, there’s no indication that he’s had sex with men before, or that he enjoys it. But Lee perseveres, convincing him to accompany him to South America, covering all costs and bargaining for intimacy once or twice a week.

Burroughs purists might scoff, but it lends credibility and warmth to the trajectory of this transactional relationship that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes have sanded down some of Lee’s more abrasive edges from the novel — his patronizing attitudes toward Mexicans for one. Craig looks both seedy and elegant, louche and dashing in his linen suits and fedora. You can understand a youth being dazzled by Lee’s “routines,” flavorful anecdotes full of seductive conversational flourishes.

While Craig makes this loquacious side of the character highly entertaining, he’s also superb at showing Lee’s unaccustomed self-exposure, his aching need for human contact increasing his vulnerability as his addiction to Eugene becomes chronic. With illuminating new self-knowledge comes crippling weakness, something Craig fully conveys in a ballsy performance covering a broad psychological and emotional spectrum.

Once they depart Mexico, drug withdrawals leave Lee weak and shivering, clinging to every tenuous sign that Eugene cares for him. Playing a withholding character, Starkey deftly keeps an air of mystery around that question though he never risks being perceived as a mere user. Despite being ambivalent about the sex, his irritation is tempered by compassion for hopelessly consumed Lee. The actor quietly sizzles in the high-waisted trousers and knit shirts of the time; Eugene wears his preppy wardrobe with a natural panache about which he seems oblivious.

The purpose of the South America trip is to find a plant-derived hallucinogen called yagé, more commonly known as ayahuasca, which Lee believes can trigger powers of telepathic divination. This takes them into the Ecuadorian jungle to meet wildly eccentric, stringy-haired American botanist Dr. Cotter, who lives in a hut with her younger male companion (Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso) and a sloth. (Another of Guadagnino’s directing contemporaries, David Lowery, appears earlier as one of Lee’s bar acquaintances.)

The botanist is played to the hilt by Lesley Manville (also unrecognizable), feral and ferocious, packing a pistol lest anyone try to make off with her precious research material. Lee assures her in his disarming way that they just want to sample the brew, which she warns them is a mirror, not a portal to another place.

Psychedelic tripping scenes in movies often tend to be embarrassing. But Guadagnino knows what he’s doing, folding together body horror elements reminiscent of his Suspiria remake — if you want to see two men literally vomit up their hearts, you’re in the right place — with an almost balletic union between Lee and Eugene that’s as spiritual as it is carnal.

Cotter encourages them to stick around and see where more of the drug could take them, but they decline. As they leave, she tells Eugene: “The door is already open. You can’t close it.” Those cryptic words hang in the air of a haunting epilogue with Lee back in Mexico City two years later, in which the images of Eugene in his head become enmeshed with Burroughs’ own traumatic history with Vollmer.

This is Guadagnino’s fourth collaboration with gifted Thai cinematographer Mukdeeprom; it’s heady and beautiful, finding dreamy visual poetry even in tawdriness and squalor. The air seems pervaded by palpable strains of both sensuality and desolation. The period production and costume design (respectively Stefano Baisi and Jonathan Anderson) clearly have been meticulously curated but have a lived-in feel that gives the movie as much grit as elegance.

After their pounding beats energized Challengers, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross shift gears with a score drenched in melancholy feeling, shaping the mood along with invigorating blasts of non-period tracks by New Order, Nirvana, Sinéad O’Connor and Prince, among others. Those bold choices are typical of Guadagnino’s sure hand throughout this strange, beguiling film, fueled by tenderness, loneliness, lust and swooning unrequited love.

A hybrid musical-docu-biopic Lego movie like “Piece by Piece” is a rich concept. The bright jubilation of “Happy,” the chart-topping hit for producer/musician Pharrell Williams, would presumably make his life story and the form of animation a perfect fit. Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.

Neville leans on the kind of visual storytelling common to documentary film, his bread and butter, throughout “Piece by Piece.” The opening, for instance, borrows the aesthetic language of behind-the-scenes documentaries by having a camera following behind a Lego Pharrell (voicing himself) as he walks into his home. The singer asks his wife Helen to quiet the kids because he’s about to be interviewed. Pharrell and the camera go to a separate room, where two chairs are set up: one for him and another for a Lego version of Neville. The filmmaker then prompts the star to tell his life story—inspiring Pharrell to imagine himself as a baby sea creature swimming through the ocean toward the Roman god of the sea Neptune. That dreamed origin story pushes us to the shores of Virginia Beach, Pharrell’s hometown, where he lives in the Atlantis projects with his mother and father. 

From then on, the film takes a rise-and-fall-and-rise format. At his grammar school, Pharrell connects with Pusha T, Missy Elliot, Timbaland, and his eventual Neptunes collaborators Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. The band impresses superstar music producer Teddy Riley, inspiring Williams and Hugo to maximize their creative potential. It leads to collaborations with Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake and more. The plethora of hits, of course, lends the film its jukebox appeal. But visually, Neville, uninspiringly just recreates the music videos for “Hollaback Girl” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot” as Legos. The success Pharrell experiences becomes the primary conflict as he stretches himself too thin as a hitmaker and as the head of fashion and product lines.

It’s all pretty ho-hum. Biopics, especially with the subject’s involvement, are always sanitized. Despite the film’s love of oft-bleeped expletives, “Piece by Piece” is far too clean. Pharrell’s two main character flaws in this film add up to: I’m too trusting and yet I’m afraid of commitment. The former gets him in trouble with A&R men sanding down his musical complexity. The latter occurs in his music, jumping from genre to genre, and in his personal life, with his girlfriend and eventual wife. These aren’t uninteresting obstacles. But they can’t be the sum-total of a person’s complexity. Rather Neville emphasizes Pharrell’s faith in God, his devotion to his friends—such as helping a down-on-his-luck Pusha T score a hit—and his seemingly boundless creativity as the main talking points. 

Those aims leave many other narrative questions unanswered. Neville and Pharrell make it a point that the Neptunes were locked in a music deal with Teddy Riley, but it’s never explained how the group were able to break out of that deal once they found representation. Pharrell’s parents appear as comic relief, but not much else is revealed about them. Pharrell’s songwriting process is also likened to his putting together Lego pieces until they shine a la the lightbulb above a great idea. Nothing else, however, is said of his actual methodology or ethos. 

Most of all, the film rarely finds inventive ways to talk about Pharrell’s inner life. Sequences where the artist’s synesthesia are represented onscreen are the exception, roaring as vibrant, blooming hues of hypnotic color. There are other whimsical moments, such as a statue of Neptune coming alive or Pharrell imagining himself being left out at sea by nefarious A&R men, but this film is never as playful as it’d like you to believe. 

Rather the overstretched and underthought “Piece by Piece” is always struggling to check the boxes of its genre requirements: the musical sequences lack originality, the Lego animation doesn’t go beyond the expected sheen, the biopic elements are too controled and the humor is intermittent. It’s also unclear who exactly this movie is for? With its heavy expletives it’s certainly not for kids. And with it being animated, you wonder how many adults will gravitate toward a movie trying to straddle the line between winking and clean. There are simply too many chunks missing from “Piece by Piece” for it to be as memorable as its subject.   

This review was filed from the premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The film opens on October 11, 2024.

Martin Scorsese made his name in the 1970s with dramas about characters living on the fringes of society. Francis Ford Coppola, seeking his own personal projects, almost reluctantly struck paydirt with the first two “Godfather” movies. George Lucas, of course, wrote and directed “Star Wars.” But none had a stranger, more expressive decade than Brian De Palma. With a string of sensational, graphic thrillers and horror movies, including “Sisters” (1972), “Carrie” (1976), “The Fury” (1978) and “Dressed to Kill” (1980), De Palma created his own film language — gory and operatic, kinky and depraved, laden with optical effects (find someone who looks at you the way De Palma looks at a split screen) and often comically indebted to Alfred Hitchcock. Many moviegoers loathe De Palma. Many more love him. But very few find him boring.

And yet, “The De Palma Decade,” the new book out now by author and filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau, somehow makes him seem just that. This is less a critical consideration or biography so much as, to borrow the title of the unnerving Frederick Exley novel, a fan’s notes. Bouzereau, who made the recent (and excellent) Faye Dunaway documentary, “Faye,” really, really likes De Palma. He refers to a scene in “Sisters” as “pure cinematic genius.” Michael Caine’s performance as the transgender psychiatrist/murderer in “Dressed to Kill” is “predictably amazing and daring”; that film’s intricately constructed cat-and-mouse seduction sequence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the interiors were actually shot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — is “simply mesmerizing and bewitching.” John Farris’ source novel for “The Fury” is “fascinating.” Even more, er, fascinating is that such anodyne language can be used to describe a filmmaker who has always been determined to jolt the viewer out of any sense of complacency.

“The De Palma Decade” unfolds as a series of oral histories plus copious plot summary, featuring interviews with De Palma — or, as Bouzereau refers to him near the book’s beginning, “Brian” — and an array of his cast and crew members through the years. Walking through these pages you’ll find the likes of Amy Irving (“Carrie,” “The Fury”), film editor Paul Hirsch (who won an Oscar for cutting “Star Wars”) and Chicago theater veteran Dennis Franz, who, as De Palma devotees know, warmed up for his signature work in “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue” by playing cops in “The Fury” and, most delightfully, “Dressed to Kill.”

Bouzereau did some reporting, and some of his subjects actually have something to say. De Palma talks about the importance of music in setting the tone for his long, dialogue-free scenes (like that museum sequence). Hirsch riffs on the different approaches taken by “The Fury” stars Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes: Douglas, who attacked his role with vim, came in hot but fizzled in later takes, while it took Cassavetes, who often booked acting jobs to help pay for the movies he wanted to make himself, about 10 takes to get loose. Nestled between the platitudes of “The De Palma Decade” are some genuine insights into the filmmaking process.

But the author’s unabashed adoration of De Palma can be a hindrance to deeper understanding. Bouzereau touches on the primary controversy surrounding “Dressed to Kill,” that “De Palma conflates transness with mental illness and homicidal behavior.” Caine’s character does indeed come across as a trans person whose conflicted identity leads him to kill. Here we go. Bouzereau is going to ask his hero how he views all of this now. And then … he doesn’t. Instead, De Palma says a little about how his screenplay for “Cruising,” a movie ultimately written and directed by William Friedkin, led to some of his ideas for “Dressed to Kill.” With that, the author lets him skate, onto the next platitude. Early on, Bouzereau writes that he has “no intention here to make a social treaty or statement or defend the controversial aspects of De Palma’s work” (perhaps he means “treatise,” not “treaty”). Fair enough. But the idea of handling such a gleeful provocateur with kid gloves seems to somehow miss the point of De Palma’s work.

Laurent Bouzereau’s unabashed adoration of Brian De Palma can be a hindrance to deeper understanding.

(Travers Jacobs)

The book covers seven films, organized thematically into three sections: The Split (“Sisters” and “Dressed to Kill”), The Power (“Carrie” and “The Fury”) and The Tragedies (“Phantom of the Paradise,” “Obsession” and “Blow Out”). “The Split,” of course, has multiple meanings for De Palma, who used split screens not merely as an aesthetic exercise: Like many an artist of the macabre, going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe, he also made bloody hay out of the theme of doubling, and the terror and instability inherent to the idea of a divided self.

By the time he made “Sisters,” in 1972, De Palma had already done a few scrappy counterculture features, including “Greetings” (1968), “The Wedding Party” (1969) and “Hi, Mom!” (1970). But “Sisters,” a proper freakout starring Margot Kidder, playing conjoined twins, is the first of what we now think of as a De Palma movie: a psychosexual nightmare with madman instincts. Viewed with the hindsight of 52 years, it feels of a piece with other rule-breaking, devil-may-care horror films of the period, including George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left” (1972) and David Cronenberg’s “Shivers” (1975).

It is, in other words, the real deal. Paradoxically, it also marks De Palma’s true entry into the sincerest form of flattery, the imitation game. Bouzereau starts his defense early, asking, “Is it fair to label De Palma a copycat? Isn’t he, rather, the legitimate heir to the Hitchcock kingdom?” He may, in fact, be both.

Angie Dickinson is trapped in an elevator by a psychotic killer in director Brian De Palma’s 1980 movie “Dressed to Kill.”

(Filmways Pictures)

De Palma’s slavish emulation of Hitchcock runs through numerous films, and with notable specificity. Someone witnesses a murder in the apartment across the way, a la “Rear Window” (“Sisters,” “Body Double”). A blond star is murdered in a movie’s first act, as in “Psycho” (“Dressed to Kill,” which also throws in a couple of shower scenes and an obtuse expert explaining why a man dresses as a woman). He bows to “Vertigo” on multiple occasions, including “Blow Out” (man suffers the same tragedy twice, unable to prevent murders he has indirectly enabled) and, more directly, “Obsession,” about a grief-stricken man who reconstructs a lost lover. In these movies De Palma is almost like a hip-hop producer, mixing samples of different songs to create a new whole. He is director as collagist.

By focusing on De Palma’s ‘70s output (“Blow Out” and “Dressed to Kill” are technically early-‘80s movies, but exact decades can be imprecise markers of an artist’s thematic output), the book opts to pull up short of the director’s next, in many ways more eclectic, period. The ‘80s brought, among others, the opulence of “Scarface” (the subject of a pair of recent books, by Glenn Kenny and Nat Segaloff), the undiluted sleaze of “Body Double,” the mainstream success of “The Untouchables” and the underrecognized Vietnam War drama “Casualties of War.” If you seek a more comprehensive study, check out Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s fine 2015 documentary “De Palma.” In “The De Palma Decade,” the filmmaker gets a more precise spotlight. And he couldn’t have asked for a more devoted fan to shine it.