For the viewer watching, the whole film can be something of an out-of-body experience, placed as we are in the sweaty skin of a man swirled up in feverish desire. But there is no such dance in the William S Burroughs book the film adapts. There is no such tenderness. The source material is decidedly unsentimental. But by injecting sentiment and sensuality into the veins of his adaptation, Guadagnino ends up diluting the abjection, the unpleasantness, the tortured meanderings and embarrassing routines birthed from a libido as narcotic, all-consuming, self-destructive as William Lee’s.

Standing in as proxy for Burroughs, Lee is a middle-aged American expat living in Mexico City, looking for love and mythical drugs, pursuits modelled on the counterculture icon’s own. Burroughs became infatuated with 21-year-old college student Lewis Marker, just as Lee does with the aloof young Eugene Allerton. The Beat writer, whose drug intake was more prolific than his fiction output, embarked on expeditions into South American rainforests in search of yagé, a plant believed to bestow the gift of telepathy when brewed into ayahuasca. “The final fix,” Lee calls it at the end of Junkie, Burroughs’ debut novel that preceded Queer.

Reality liquefied into surrealist fantasies and desire evaporated into dreams in the works of Burroughs. The writing was abrasive, turbulent and strikingly visual. Burroughs violently blew up the narrative structure by “cutting up” and “folding in” the text. The radical experiments opened up fresh possibilities for fiction, allowing for the exploration of abjection within the emerging interzone between prose and poetry. This experimental streak however came after Queer’s writing. As with Junkie, his second isn’t as adventurous in its stylings. The book was written in the 1950s but was left unfinished and unpublished until 1985. Even when his stories are unfinished or barely stories at all, reading Burroughs is always weirdly compelling.

Queer is, well, queer in every sense of the word. But the film wears the title more proudly on its sleeve. The book doesn’t quite drip or grip with sex. The first time Lee and Allerton sleep together, Burroughs cuts from foreplay to afterglow. The film has Lee give a blowjob to Allerton and Allerton return the favour with a handjob. Moving from first-person narration in Junkie to the third in Queer gave Burroughs a buffer to obscure if not deny outright his own queerness. Intoxicating desire blurring the line between reality and fantasy gave him a bulwark. His stand-in inherits his shame. And sadly, the man he falls for has even deeper hang-ups.

When Burroughs described Lee as a man whose “face was ravaged and vicious and old,” Daniel Craig is not the first person who comes to mind. Sporting wrinkled linen suits, khakis and a fedora, the English actor can make even the sordid tasteful. Lee is introduced in the film cruising the streets and cantinas of Mexico City looking to get laid. He is a man seemingly out of place but desperately looking to belong, to find connection, to love and be loved. When he meets Drew Starkey’s Allerton, he is knocked off balance. Lee thirsts and fantasizes. Allerton yields and withdraws. In between deciphering the mixed signals, Lee grows clingier. “The tearing ache of limitless desire” seems to unman him. The insecurities are made physical by Craig at his moody and mannered best. Starkey plays Allerton as an unknowable man of uncertain sexuality but wholly aware and quietly flattered by Lee’s attraction. The problem for Lee is he can’t even sustain Allerton’s undivided attention. Never mind attraction.

Allerton, as Lee puts it, is “not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible.” Hoping to forge a connection beyond the physical and a relationship beyond transactional, Lee persuades Allerton to accompany him on a trip to Ecuador. The search for yage doesn’t bear fruit. Allerton disappears. Lee returns to Mexico City, back where he started, plagued by dreams of his ex. The screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes affords their romance a resolution: the pair do find what they are looking for in Ecuador, consume ayahuasca, vomit their beating hearts, and engage in a wordless intercourse. The next morning, Allerton abandons Lee without a word. To give Lee some form of closure and the film a tidier narrative shape, Kuritzkes turns to Burrough’s life. The dreamlike epilogue finds Lee confronting Allerton, a figment of his anguished imagination. Allerton places a glass on his head. Lee aims at the glass but ends up shooting Allerton in the forehead — as Burroughs drunkenly did his wife Joan Vollmer in an ill-fated game of William Tell in Mexico in 1951 while writing Queer.

When Queer was published decades later in 1985, Burroughs credited his wife’s accidental murder for his writing career. “The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out,” the preface reads. To adapt Queer, Guadagnino also adapts its author, his fraught relationship with queerness, his iconography and mythology. The film opens with Sinéad O’Connor’s stripped-back cover of Nirvana’s All Apologies, underscoring its call for acceptance. The first time Lee and Allerton lock eyes, the song playing in the background is Nirvana’s Come as You Are. (Burroughs was a literary hero to frontman Kurt Cobain and the two even collaborated on a guitar-backed spoken word project in 1992.) The anachronistic soundtrack choices impart a sense of timelessness to Burroughs’s story.

Mexico City, in Queer, emerges as a humid cauldron of desires. Longing saturates its air and lust sweats out of its horny expats’ every open pore. Local hangouts like the Ship Ahoy and entire neighbourhoods were recreated on a Cinecittà backlot in Rome for the film. Lee’s seedy hotel room is rigged out with a forsaken typewriter, a teeming ashtray and a bed with the funk of cigarettes and liquor and sex. Burroughs’ world feels like a hermetically sealed museum exhibit of itself. Not to suggest the film is a hollow exercise in exteriority. Guadagnino’s style can sometimes feel too studied, too academic, too sterile for Burroughs. But there is a certain alchemy to the way the Italian sensualist conveys desire through body language, movement and texture. This natural instinct prevents the film from shrinking into a flaccid retelling.

Desire burns like a fever in Queer. The craving for reciprocation causes a fevered mind to imagine phantom figurations. When Lee and Allerton go to the cinema to see Jean Cocteau’s 1950 classic Orpheus in the book, Lee describes his desire as a “blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals.” Guadagnino depicts this projection of inner fantasy by borrowing Cocteau’s double exposure effect. Longing manifests as a spectral arm reaching out to caress Allerton’s face and kiss his neck.

On the trip to Ecuador, Lee comes down with dysentery. As he suffers from cold flashes aggravated by withdrawal sickness on a bad night, he asks Allerton, sleeping in the adjoining twin bed, if he can join him. Allerton consents. Lee comes over and spoons his lover for comfort. In the novel, Allerton puts his knee over Lee’s body while asleep. In the film, a half-asleep, half-concerned Allerton drapes his leg over a violently shivering Lee’s — a more conscious act of love that becomes a defining image.

“I’m not queer. I’m disembodied,” a line that appears once in the book becomes a loaded refrain in the film. It speaks to the unease Burroughs felt about identifying as gay and the detachment queer people feel from themselves. The film’s abstraction of identity and body serves to formalise the destabilising effect of desire. To desire is to seek embodiment. It is the ghost of longing reaching out to caress a lover’s face, the comfort of their warmth when cold, the ecstasy of hearing your name in their mouth. To desire and be desired, in Queer, is to allow yourself to be subsumed by the idealised other. When Allerton echoes Lee’s refrain during their consummatory dance, it signals a telepathic bond solidified by their shared sense of detachment and otherness. The mirror yagé holds up challenges Allerton to face the truth about his identity. The experience opens a door that can’t be closed. But Allerton decides to look away. And Lee is stuck looking back.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.