Daniel Craig plays a fictional William S. Burroughs: NPR

William Lee (Daniel Craig, right) falls in love with a newly discharged US Navy soldier (Drew Starkey). Strange.

Yannis Drakoulidis/A24

Hide caption

Toggle label

Yannis Drakoulidis/A24

Nobody practices such forbidden desires in faraway places like Luca Guadagnino. He whisked us away to Italy for the passionate affairs of I am love And Call me by your name; gave us love and death on a Sicilian island A bigger splash; and took us all over America in the cannibal romance Bones and everything. Now he’s finished Strangea gritty account of thwarted desires that begins in an expatriate corner of Mexico City in the early 1950s – a world that Guadagnino brings to life in all its sweaty, dirty glory.

The story follows an American drifter named William Lee, played by Daniel Craig with a cheeky smile and barely a hint of 007 elegance. Addicted to alcohol and heroin, Lee spends his days hopping from bar to bar, hoping to look into the eyes of the handsome young men he sees there and around town and more. And few are more attractive than Eugene Allerton, a newly discharged US Navy soldier played by a great Drew Starkey. Allerton is slim, slim and distant to the point of contempt, which makes Lee want him all the more.

In time, after a few meals and many drinks, the two fall into bed, in a scene that Guadagnino films with both roughness and tenderness. But once isn’t enough for Lee and he spends every minute trying to keep this enigmatic young beauty from slipping away from him.

Lee is a fictional replacement for Beat writer William S. Burroughs, whose years in Mexico were eventful to say the least. He started writing Strange in 1952, while awaiting trial for the murder of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during what he originally said was a drunken game of William Tell.

Burroughs never finished the book, which was eventually published in incomplete form in 1985. By this point he had become a counterculture icon, known for his bold experimental works such as Naked lunchhis struggles with addiction and his many sexual relationships with men and women.

Guadagnino has said in interviews he has read Strange at a young age and have wanted to make a film of it for years. This might come as a surprise to some fans of the director, as he has been expressing his swoon-worthy romanticism lately challenger – doesn’t obviously fit with the biting rawness of Burroughs’ prose.

At the same time, Guadagnino clearly enjoys defying expectations, and that extends to his horror films as well Suspiriahave shown a flair for the surreal and grotesque. Even if StrangeAs the narrative loses momentum, it’s fascinating to see a filmmaker known for his lush, beautiful surfaces attempt to connect with a writer’s notoriously uncompromising ugliness.

For the first hour or so, Justin Kuritzkes’ script remains largely true to its original. But things take a strange turn when Lee convinces Allerton to travel to South America so they can find a psychedelic called Yageor ayahuasca, which can apparently give telepathic powers.

Deep in the jungles of Ecuador, Guadagnino is essentially trying to imagine the mind-blowing ending that Burroughs never wrote. The director clearly has fun filling the screen with hallucinatory images and introducing an armed healer, played by an unrecognizable Lesley Manville. In a maddening and mesmerizing sequence, Lee and Allerton dance silently naked under the influence of drugs, their bodies twisting and merging as if under a kaleidoscope.

Guadagnino is working overtime to honor Burroughs. In the completely crazy epilogue, set in Mexico, he goes far beyond the boundaries of the novel to include moments from the writer’s turbulent life. But the reason Strange works has everything to do with Craig’s performance.

It’s worth remembering long before he became James Bond – or a gay detective Knife out Films – Craig played painter Francis Bacon’s tempestuous younger lover in the 1998 drama Love is the devil. He sums up this equation brilliantly Strange. With robust physicality and tender emotions, he shows us a man in abject but defiant dependence on his desires – for sex, for love, for a moment of out-of-body transcendence. It is a unique performance, but also a deeply human one in its expression of pure desire.