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Running Time
101
min
MPAA rating
Unrated
Release Date
Sep 7, 2012
Keep the Lights On
Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet through a casual encounter, but soon find a deeper connection and become a couple. Individually and together, they are risk takers-compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity while being true to himself.
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‘Keep the Lights On” is set in three different years. None of them is 1991. But that’s a year in which this movie, which was directed and co-written by Ira Sachs, seems like it was made and released. It has the grainy, washed-out look of almost every independent film released in the early 1990s. It tells the story of a filmmaker named Erik (Thure Lindhardt), who’s in a relationship with a preppy New York lawyer named Paul (Zachary Booth), which means “Keep the Lights On” also shares homosexuality as the subject of a significant number of that same generation of movie. But while Paul has a shameful secret, the secret is not that he’s gay, because Sachs, mercifully, wants to advance the conversation beyond the closet. It’s that Paul’s in an even more consuming relationship with crack-cocaine. And someday a movie will advance us beyond that.
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