Sexy & seedy, 1998 indie High Art is a queer classic of sapphic awakening

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, with the 2026 Sundance coming to a close, let’s revisit 1998’s High Art, another queer indie classic that had its debut at the festival.

The Sundance Film Festival concludes its 2026 edition this weekend, marking its final year in its iconic home of Park City, Utah, before moving on to its new host city in Boulder, Colorado next year. As we continue to look back at the hefty legacy of queer films that premiered there over the years, this week we’ll revisit a landmark lesbian drama that put a beloved ’80s icon back in the spotlight, and kickstarted the career of one of the most representative filmmakers of the New Queer Cinema wave.

The Set-Up

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Premiering at Sundance in 1998, High Art, The film (directed by then first-time feature director Lisa Cholodenko) follows Sydney (Radha Mitchell), a young aspiring editor at a renowned photography magazine, who one day learns that she and her boyfriend James (Gabriel Mann) are living underneath world-famous retired photographer Lucy Berliner (played by ’80s Brat Pack icon Ally Sheedy).

As Sydney befriends Lucy and convinces her to shoot a feature for her magazine, she falls into her bohemian and sexually fluid circle of party friends (which includes Lucy’s on-&-off German girlfriend Greta, deliciously played by Patricia Clarkson), as well as the heavy drug addictions that simultaneously binds them together and is slowly destroying them.

The film is a heavy (and often ruthless) examination of the toll that drug usage takes on creative people, and the ways in which it creates and fuels the relationship with their art, as well as how it eats their relationships from the inside. Sydney serves as the audience surrogate, the seemingly straight “good girl” that is lured into the endlessly appealing free spirit realm of Lucy and her acolytes, and ends up slowly becoming a victim of it.

A Sapphic Sensation

As most independent movies of the ’90s, it’s a film heavy on dialogue, tone, and mood, contained in just a handful of locations (Lucy’s apartment becomes a sort of otherworldly opium den in which guests come to live and die), and it’s almost entirely carried by the performances of its cast. Radha Mitchell (riding the high wave of her late ’90s/ early 2000s career peak) plays Sydney with the right amount of naiveté and curiosity; a young girl who’s lived an entirely predictable life until then and is thirsty for someone to show her something different and exciting.

The supporting cast contains a variety of character actors that populated these smaller movies at the time, and usually would come from bigger careers or would go to take more prominence. There’s Gabriel Mann as Sydney’s well-intentioned boyfriend who sees her slowly slip through the cracks of addiction (you probably best remember Mann as the deliciously evil sidekick Nolan Ross in ABC’s Revenge), Broadway legend Tammy Grimes in a small cameo as Lucy’s mother (Grimes is a two-time Tony Award winner and first wife of Christopher Plummer), and even Sarita Choudhury in a small role as one of Lucy’s addict friends (she’d of course go on to have a prominent film and TV career, most recently as Seema in And Just Like That…).

Star Power

However, there are two performances that truly elevate this film, and that made up the bulk of its critical acclaim (apart from its screenplay, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance). Ally Sheedy is probably still most well-known as one of the five teenagers in John Hughes’ cultural touchstone The Breakfast Club, playing “The Basket Case” Allison Reynolds. Sheedy had a hard time breaking out of the teen roles and archetypes that her ’80s work boxed her into, and High Art provided a rare opportunity for her to play something completely different. And she did not disappoint.

Sheedy plays Lucy with the right amount of mystery, seductiveness, and charm that turns her into an almost cult-like leader, always with a group of devotees following her around. She is someone dangerous that you want to be around. She is someone broken that you want to understand. She is able to make anyone she wants fall in love with her, and weaponizes that affection. This role gave Sheedy perhaps the most critical acclaim of her career, including Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Independent Spirit Awards (if you haven’t seen it, her over 10-minute acceptance speech for the latter one is a must-see).

Patricia Clarkson gives one of her most defining performances as Greta, a faded German actress and Lucy’s current girlfriend who seems to be in a perpetual high, does not mince words, and even though her energy levels are always on the ground, her attitude is razor sharp and biting. Clarkson infuses the role (and the film in general) with a tricky balance of comedic relief (her one-liners are nothing short of iconic) but also heft and seriousness; she is the worst example of what happens when you’re inside this circle of people for too long.

Museum-Worthy

Although High Art didn’t necessarily propel Lisa Scholodenko into mainstream Hollywood (which was a sad but regular occurrence with Sundance filmmakers, particularly female and queer), she was able to build a steady career afterwards, mainly directing television series (most notably the 2014 adaptation of Olive Kitteridge for HBO), and finding her biggest success in 2010 with The Kids Are All Right, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Cholodenko has yet to direct another feature film since then, which does not speak well of the current landscape for filmmakers that want to make something outside the mainstream.

But that’s something that Sundance has always excelled at. As it moves on from its current form to a new era in a new city, we hope it maintains its legacy of centering up-and-coming voices, particularly those of underrepresented communities, and elevates them to a point that does not only recognize their current work, but sets them up for ongoing success.

There are always dozens of new Lisa Cholodenkos, and Ally Sheedys, and High Arts to be discovered.

High Art is streaming on Kanopy, and is available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon Prime Video & AppleTV.

You can keep track of all LGBTQ+ films covered in our A Gay Old Time column via writer Jorge Molina’s handy Letterboxd List.

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