No Picnic at Speed Cinema

Essential Cinema/New 4K Restoration
No Picnic
Directed by Philip Hartman

Saturday, July 11, 3 pm | BUY TICKETS

$12 | $8 Speed members

“A forgotten eighties NYC movie is back, scuzzier and better than ever. No Picnic captures New York’s boho hipster Lower East Side on the edge of Reagan-era gentrification — and a new restoration just saved it from obscurity.”– David Fear, Rolling Stone

Philip Hartman’s No Picnic is a priceless artifact of New York’s pre-gentrification East Village, with appearances by Steve Buscemi, Richard Hell, Luis Guzmán, and other fixtures of the Downtown music and art scenes. The winds of change were in the air during the film’s production in the summer of 1985 as Hartman raced to capture his neighborhood in all its squalid glory. Hartman’s neo-noir comedy follows down-and-out jukebox operator Macabee Cohn, played with deadpan melancholy by David Brisbin, who wanders the cheap tenements, dive bars, and derelict streets of the Lower East Side in search of a mysterious woman in a striped dress.

No Picnic was showered with praise (Manohla Dargis called it “the genuine article” in the Village Voice), Peter Hutton won a Sundance prize for his gorgeously evocative black-and-white cinematography, and a theatrical run at Anthology Film Archives broke box-office records. 1987, U.S., 4K DCP, 87 minutes. Recommended for 16+.