A New York Muse
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Nicole Crowley
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: melancholic, sensual
A self-styled "Audrey Hepburn of the Lower East Side" stages her own myth across poetry readings, hotel beds, and late-night cabs. Crowley films the performance and the person collapsing into each other.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally — a downtown NYC portrait that doesn't pretend its subject isn't co-directing the myth. Self-aware muse-doc is a genre I didn't know I needed until Crowley invented it.
A documentary about a subject directing her own coverage — vlog plus archival plus B&W reenactment around a self-styled 'Audrey Hepburn of the Lower East Side' — is exactly the kind of formal mess I find irresistible when it's earned. The Akerman-meets-Sedgwick framing promises a real wrestle.
Blurs vlog/archival/B&W reenactment around a self-mythologizing subject who refuses to stop directing her own coverage — that's the right form for the subject. The Warhol-haircut le-hotel-boy week is the kind of detail that only exists if you're inside the bender.