Kritiken

The beauty of Keep The Lights On lies in its clear-eyed, full-bodied empathy: In looking back on this up-and-down, often hysterical experience, Sachs communicates not blind anger or frustration but a warm, complicated acceptance.

There's not much story here, even for autobiography; it reads like a Frank O'Hara poem, where "this happens" and then "that happens" while tone is communicated through syntax. But there's a thumping rhythm that maintains at least the illusion that the characters are moving forward.

By stretching out the action over years, Sachs avoids the arbitrary whiplash of last year's similarly themed Like Crazy, letting the lacunae between encounters resonate; he isn't interested in events so much as moments, fleeting and almost imperceptible.

Well-intended and far from merely 'worthy', Keep the Lights On nonetheless lacks the conviction or sweep to convey anything more than a vague sense that These Things Happened.

Sachs credibly evokes the texture of late-'90s New York, but while the milieu is clearly personal, the central dynamic of Keep the Lights On remains frustratingly remote.

Keep the Lights On never quite succeeds as a portrait of two people in passionate thrall to each other, partly because we know (or can at least easily infer) where things are going—the film's whole reason for being is that it is based on a relationship that didn't work out. But it's extremely effective (and affecting) as a character study of a man coming to realize that he'd rather be his whole self than somebody else's better half.

As one can imagine, there's nothing else quite like Erik on American screens: neither trying to be masculine nor effeminate, never afraid to come off as slightly pathetic in his beseeching to Paul while at the same time finding surprising pockets of strength in every other line reading, Lindhardt's Erik is an arresting creation, both an authentic sketching of a multidimensional contemporary gay man and a gratifyingly kinky character pleasurable to watch in his eccentricities.

Initially engrossing, I found "Keep the Lights On" ever more meandering and, despite one or two powerhouse scenes, only intermittently touching–not to mention curiously averse to ending on the tragic note that the material seemed to demand.

With its naked but never self-indulgent depictions of sex and all manner of addiction, Keep the Lights On is disarmingly, at times exhilaratingly, human.

The period detail is so peg on, you could easily think you'd stumbled upon a lost, Haynesian classic of New Queer Cinema. For all intents and purposes, that's exactly what Keep the Lights On is: the fulfillment of an uncompromised vision. Maybe it's a bit late, but someone had to make this dream of a movie, one that charts with uncommon depth the highs, lows and middles shared by naive doc-maker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and his troubled, crack-addicted lover and heartbreaker, Paul (Zachary Booth).

It acknowledges how each of our claims to selfhood, be it sexual, romantic, or professional, are staged on a shifting terrain of habit, fantasy, and desire. Erik's studiously butch telephone manner is only a heightened case of the more generalized projections that shape all of our psychic and social bonds. Keep the Lights On is sharply attuned to the resentments that undergird couples whose shared lives must negotiate wildly different career structures and claims on their attention.

It's richly textured, sad and beautiful autobiographical love story.