101 min | NR | June 23, 2023 | Kino Lorber
Nancy Buirski digs into how a movie about two desperate men hustling through a rotting New York City became the only X-rated film to win Best Picture. She treats the 1969 release as a fault line where Old Hollywood died and something hungrier took its place. The result is a documentary that loves its subject and trusts you to keep up.
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is a documentary about how a single film captured a country in the middle of coming apart. The subject is John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, the story of a Texas drifter and a sickly con man surviving on the margins of a decaying Manhattan. Nancy Buirski uses that film as a lens for everything pressing against it in 1969. Vietnam, assassinations, the collapse of the studio system, and a censorship code in its death throes all crowd into the frame. The real subject is the moment when American cinema stopped pretending and started looking directly at the rot.
Bob Balaban, who acted in the original film as a young man, speaks with the candor of someone who watched the production from inside. He grounds the cultural argument in the practical reality of how the movie got made. Jennifer Salt and Brian De Palma appear as members of Schlesinger’s circle and place the director within a specific community of artists pushing against convention. Cinematographer Adam Holender explains the visual choices that made the city feel diseased rather than romantic. Photographer Michael Childers, who was Schlesinger’s partner, supplies the intimacy that the archival record cannot.
Buirski writes and directs with a method built on collision. She cuts between talking heads, film clips, and period news footage so the past and the film bleed into each other. The editing refuses to keep Midnight Cowboy quarantined from history. A clip of Joe Buck wandering Times Square sits against footage of soldiers and protests, and the juxtaposition does the argument’s work without narration spelling it out. The approach is dense and the connective tissue sometimes strains under the weight of how much it tries to hold.
This is the work of a filmmaker who understands that a movie is never only itself. Buirski treats Midnight Cowboy as evidence of a culture finally willing to admit what it had been hiding. The film reaches for more than it can fully grasp, and a few of its threads stay loose. It stands as one of Buirski’s final works, and it carries the confidence of someone who spent a career insisting that art and history are the same story told twice.