‘Queer’ Review: ‘Daniel Craig Goes Cruising for Sex, Drugs — and an Oscar

His name is Lee … Bill Lee. A man slouching toward middle age and suffering the malaise of someone who’s seen it all, heard it all, shot it all into his veins, he’s embraced the dissolute life of an ex-pat. Sporting an endless supply of filthy linen suits and ever-present fedoras, Lee cruises the bars looking to score sex and junk in Mexico. Sweaty afternoons are spent buzzed on cheap tequila and bantering with his fellow social outcasts. Evenings are spent in the company of willing young men and needles. Life is debauched and consistent, until that handsome twentysomething gent wanders into Lee’s favorite watering hole. You think heroin is hard to kick? Try detoxing from true love.

Written in the early 1950s, published in 1985, and poised to become a belated part of the Beat Generation canon any day now, William S. Burroughs’ Queer has always been the runt of his literary litter. It had been designed to be somewhat of an extension-slash-sequel to Junkie, his first novel, but ended up being shunted aside and shelved. The author himself always had mixed feelings about it, what with its autobiographical leanings and poked pressure points; detailing his own doomed affair with Adelbert Lewis Marker (named Eugene Allerton in the book) and a trip they took to Ecuador in search of a mind-altering drug, Burroughs considered the book too painful and too personal to return to it. By the time the work finally reached readers, the writer was a countercultural icon, and his past had been mythologized enough to give the story context. It still remains an outlier in the lit-outlaw’s back catalog.

Whether or not Luca Guadagnino‘s screen adaptation will change the book’s standing remains to be seen — but this sordid, steamy, and exceedingly swooning take on Burroughs’ novel will certainly move you to appreciate how he makes the author’s amour fou tale his own. And it will definitely alter your view of Daniel Craig. The British movie star had already been in the process of shaking off his association with a certain career-defining role, in addition to jogging your memory in regards to his range beyond Bond — his dandy sleuth in the Knives Out movies is worlds away from the antihero employed in her majesty’s secret service. Embodying Burroughs’ alter ego and cycling through Lee’s lust, jealousy, world-weariness, neediness, and bliss, Craig cracks this smitten, doomed romantic wide open. It’s the role of a lifetime if you hold nothing back. So he doesn’t.

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It’s not just the explicit love scenes between Craig’s Lee, a man who gives in to his appetites reluctantly even as he follows them down abyss-like rabbit holes, and Allerton — played with remarkable poise by Drew Starkey — leave little to the imagination. What’s shocking is the vulnerability that the actor shows you as he gets pulled into a relationship destined to destroy him as if guided by a tractor beam. Lee’s early attempt to catch the new resident’s eye by doing a clumsy dance and doffing his hat couldn’t be less appealing, yet he still manages to talk this cryptic, somewhat aloof object of desire into bed. He wants this younger man, to be certain, and judging from the way they both attack each other’s torsos and belts, the hunger seems mutual.

But more importantly, Lee wants Allerton to love him. He can get this collegiate dreamboat into the sack, but can’t find his way into his crush’s heart. Forced to share his new companion’s attention with a variety of male and female suitors, Lee desperately proposes a jaunt to South America in search of a rumored plant that aids telepathy, and which some refer to by the exotic name ayahuasca. The last-gasp attempt makes things burn brightly until they hit the inevitable burnout.

No stranger to fiery love affairs, fraught dynamics or formal gambits, Guadagnino sets the movie’s torrid first half in a fantasy Mexico City one phallic statue away from going full Querelle. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder might have been the only filmmaker better suited to bring this material to the screen in all its ragged, hyperventilating glory.) The period is the 1950s, which does not stop the Italian filmmaker from loading the soundtrack with tracks from Nirvana, Prince and others; you may never hear New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” again without thinking of Craig’s wounded, stoned face in close-up. Along with Jason Schwartzman‘s scene-stealing fellow traveler and a host of other competitive frenemies, Lee treats these dusty bars filled with boys as both bazaars and sanctuaries. Once he and Allerton head south, with the former suffering through dopesickness and dejection as the latter grows more distant, things get more surreal. Encountering Lesley Manville’s botanist, essentially a feral female Colonel Kurtz reimagined as a fever dream, they ingest their prize hallucinogen and become a blur of melded, rubbery flesh. It’s the beginning of the end.

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Queer demands you meet Burroughs’ deadpan outrageousness on its own level, as well as leaving room for the more experimental cinematic interpretations of his prose that come from Guadagnino’s imagination and touchstones; an epilogue suggests the “Star Child” ending of 2001 if directed by David Lynch. It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material. Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig. For all of the stylistic flourishes, the dizzying detours into the mystic, the footnoted references to both past works and Burroughs’ own backstory (there’s a sequence that purposefully mines the author’s real-life shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer), it’s really a story of love and loss between two men, resting on the broad shoulders of one well-known man. Craig goes for broke cruising for sex and drugs, heading rapidly for a permanent case of heartbreak. Depending on how homophobic or timid certain awards-voting demographics, he may also be cruising for something shiny and gold as well. Regardless, this is a milestone in his career. May a thousand disruptive flowers bloom for him in its wake.

This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.