High Art is Lisa Cholodenko’s intimate New York indie about a junior photo editor (Syd) who stumbles into the upstairs world of Lucy Berliner, a once-celebrated photographer living in a haze of downtown cool and hard drugs. The film premiered at Sundance, where Cholodenko won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and later earned Ally Sheedy a sweep of critics’ prizes and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead.
A leaking bathroom ceiling sends Syd (Radha Mitchell) upstairs to meet Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy). Syd recognizes the spark in Lucy’s contact prints—unguarded portraits of friends and lovers—and persuades her magazine to court Lucy for a comeback spread. Drawn to Lucy’s talent and vulnerability, Syd begins visiting the apartment’s perpetual twilight: Fassbinder-name-dropping friends, vinyl, cigarettes, and Greta (Patricia Clarkson), Lucy’s mercurial German partner, herself a faded actress tethered to heroin and nostalgia.
Boundaries blur. For “access,” Syd samples the group’s nights out; for love and art, Lucy picks up her camera again. A country-house escape crystallizes their affair and Lucy quietly photographs Syd—images that will later make the issue. Greta spirals; Lucy wavers between sober work and the undertow of old habits. Publication day arrives with two gut punches: Syd’s career rises on Lucy’s pages, and Lucy is gone. The last image—Syd leafing through glossy reproductions of herself, tears falling—lands like a verdict on the price of art and the cost of being seen.
High Art Cast
Charactor
A young, ambitious photo editor in New York who becomes captivated by Lucy’s work—and eventually by Lucy herself. Her journey blurs the lines between professionalism, desire, and complicity.
Radha Mitchell
Radha Mitchell is an Australian actress known for her versatile career in both indie and mainstream films. She later starred in Pitch Black (2000), Man on Fire (2004), and Silent Hill (2006). In High Art, her understated performance perfectly conveys Syd’s gradual slide from curiosity into obsession.
Once a celebrated photographer, Lucy now lives in semi-isolation, numbed by drugs and an unstable relationship. Meeting Syd rekindles her artistry—and exposes her fragility.
Ally Sheedy
Katy M. O’Brian (The Mandalorian, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) draws on her real bodybuilding past to make Jackie utterly believable. Her physicality and performance elevate the film’s violent surrealism.
Director
Lisa Cholodenko
Before The Kids Are All Right (2010)—a four-time Oscar nominee—Cholodenko mapped queer intimacy with High Art: women making (and unmaking) each other through images, with industry gatekeepers hovering at the edges.
BEST SCENES
📍 Jackie’s hallucination on stage: her body trembling, her vision warped, culminating in a grotesque vomit-vision of Lou—both horrific and strangely romantic.
📍 The canyon disposal: Lou pushing the car and body into the mountain crevice, symbolizing her break from passive silence to decisive rebellion.
📍 Final giant run: surreal and operatic, Jackie towering above the world, Lou beside her, love transformed into myth.
High Art Review
Review
⭐ Story (4.5/5)
A lean, character-first script about intimacy, power, and what we trade to belong—whether to a person, a scene, or an idea of ourselves. The magazine subplot elegantly tests Syd’s ethics without turning her into a villain.
⭐ Acting (5/5)
Sheedy’s Lucy is luminous and wrecked—magnetic enough to explain everyone’s orbit. Mitchell plays Syd’s slide from professional curiosity to personal risk with quiet precision. Clarkson’s Greta (a once-Fassbinder actress) is a dangerous, heartbreaking live wire.
⭐ Chemistry (4.5/5)
The film earns its romance in small, tactile beats—darkrooms, shared cigarettes, whispered edits—so the final rupture hurts.
⭐ Production (4/5)
Tami Reiker’s claustrophobic interiors and nicotine-amber palette make Lucy’s apartment feel like a beautiful trap; Shudder to Think’s score hums with late-90s downtown melancholy.
⭐ Ending (4/5)
Tragic yet thematically exact: love and ambition leave fingerprints you can’t retouch.
💬 My Take
As a longtime watcher of lesbian indies, I love how High Art captures the soft mechanics of consent and corruption inside a “scene.” The magazine politics feel credible (access vs. integrity), and the art talk isn’t window dressing—Cholodenko understands how a strong editor/subject dynamic can tip into love or harm. It’s also a rare film that treats photography as both craft and addiction: the more Lucy sees, the more she risks; the better Syd curates, the more compromised she becomes. That last, quiet office walk stays with me—success printed on coated stock, grief still wet.
High Art Information
🎖 Awards & Recognition
Sundance Film Festival – Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (Winner) – Lisa Cholodenko.
Independent Spirit Awards – Best Female Lead (Winner) – Ally Sheedy; multiple critics’ awards followed (LAFCA, NSFC).
Distributor: October Films; later widely acclaimed in LGBTQ+ cinema retrospectives.