There’s a persistent melancholy tone to this study of New York film-maker Howard Brookner, made by his nephew Aaron, and focusing initially on the unique and attention-grabbing movie Brookner made in 1983 about William Burroughs with the help of his film-school contemporaries, sound recordist Jim Jarmusch and cinematographer Tom DiCillo, who are both interviewed here.
Aaron visits Burroughs’s somewhat claustrophobic New York apartment, nicknamed “the Bunker”, which appears to have been kept exactly as Burroughs had it, and where the Brookner archive still is. The movie then goes on to become a broader yet sadder film about Brookner, who emerged from Burroughs’s celebrity shadow and went on to direct more work, including Bloodhounds of Broadway, a period comedy starring Madonna and Matt Dillon. He had an elegant circle of friends in Paris and London. He died of Aids in 1989.
If he had lived, would Brookner have gone on to have a career like Jarmusch’s? Perhaps. Aaron Brookner’s film is a modestly conceived personal elegy to him, to the lost generation of gay men in New York, and to a certain period in New York itself.
