Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman and Lesley Manville also star in this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel, which travels from postwar Mexico City to the Amazon.
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.
