Film Forum

John Schlesinger’s legendary MIDNIGHT COWBOY, released in 1969 with an X rating, won three Oscars®, including Best Picture. The New York Times called Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo “something found under an old door in a vacant lot,” and Jon Voight as Joe Buck “a tall, handsome young man whose open face manages to register the fuzziest of conflicting emotions within a very dim mind.” A documentary that is as much about the ’60s counterculture as it is about the making of this brilliant movie. The mean streets of New York (the hellscape that was Times Square before its family-friendly reinvention) never looked sleazier, or more sexually audacious. Schlesinger’s foray into the world of lost souls remains equal parts funny and tragic. Its homoerotic subtext is both tender and surprising, especially for having been realized more than 50 years ago. With Bob Balaban, Brenda Vaccaro, Lucy Sante, Ian Buruma, Jennifer Salt, and Brian De Palma.
 
Presented with support from the R.G. Rifkind Foundation Endowment for Queer Cinema and the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film
 
2022     101 MIN.     USA      ZEITGEIST FILMS IN ASSOCIATION WITH KINO LORBER

Reviews

“MIDNIGHT COWBOY is a terrific film to revisit, especially in the current climate. The 1969 production has achieved national-monument status in film history for a myriad of reasons which Nancy Buirski’s documentary explores. A snapshot of time but also a continuation of a conversation. A bracing, queer-themed, fiercely independent-spirited film written and directed by two closeted gay men (Schlesinger, and the writer of the book in which MIDNIGHT COWBOY was based, James Leo Herlihy). Impacted most as a profoundly moving and real film about two damaged loners.”
– Fionnuala Halligan, Screen

“Fascinating and hypnotic”
– Deadline

“Attempts to navigate the impact and cultural presence of the legendary film while also exploring the history of queer cinema, the death of the western, and the counterculture  of the ‘60s transforming into the nihilism of the 1970s.”
– The Film Stage

“[MIDNIGHT COWBOY] was perhaps the most explicit and emotionally intense film of the New Hollywood era... remains littered with contradictions. It’s nostalgic and hopeless; a celebration of the counterculture and, seemingly, an indictment of its decadence. All that makes Nancy Buirski’s new documentary about its production and legacy more interesting… [the film explains] why MIDNIGHT COWBOY became such a phenomenon, and why we’re still so fixated by it.”
– Adam Solomons, IndieWire