Imagine it: It’s New York, 1983; the city has only recently emerged from the financial crisis that rocked it for years, and it’s stepping back into its role as the mecca of modern world culture. People of all kinds are flocking back to the city, bringing their customs and ideas with them, and technology and the arts are flourishing alongside each other. This has led to whole new modes of expression, particularly the brand-new genres of hip-hop and high-tech, ultra-colorful punk spinoff New Wave. Clubs like Mudd Club, CBGB and Danceteria pumped out these new synth-heavy sounds to long-time luminaries like Warhol and Lou Reed and newer superstars like Debbie Harry and Madonna, the queer scene was thriving. Onto this heady, future-focused scene comes a New Wave movie called Liquid Sky that is unlike anything made before.

A drug-dusted fantasy that explores queer identities, Liquid Sky is a true representation of the New Wave as it was in NYC in the early 80s. Focusing on a number of stars in the music and fashion scene, the narcotics trade around them and the outsiders attracted to the spectacle, Liquid Sky used actual scene members not only as its actors but also to create the look and sound of the genre, meaning it is 100% authentic in a way few films about a movement ever are. Only the director Slava Tsukerman and some of his crew were relative outsiders, being Soviet emigres who had become fascinated with the new style, and the transgressive sex-and-sci-fi film that they made became the most financially successful independent film of 1983 and a perfect time capsule of a legendary era.

Liquid Sky Is Gorgeous, Avant-Garde and Queer as Can Be

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Liquid Sky is nothing if not direct: From its first seconds, it announces loudly that the viewer is about to be in for a weird, brightly-hued ride, showing some sort of postmodern art installation of a white mask in the middle of neon lights. The camera pans out to reveal that the ominous yet enticing sculpture resides in an equally neon-soaked small apartment, covered in every inch with brightly-colored decorations, before cutting to a shot of the World Trade Center. The next cut is a frenetic New Wave nightclub, with dancers going wild to driving synth music, and shortly after a UFO in the pulp style sci-fi of the 1940s descends onto the city.

After a psychedelic collage of radiating color resembling a neon petri dish or a collapsing star, the very first spoken line is from the impeccably-dressed androgynous Jimmy, who brashly proclaims “Hey I need some stuff,” that “stuff” revealed to be heroin, for which he does not have money but pursues despite that hindrance. As the club pulses and people of what appears to be every gender and race continue their churning dance, Jimmy convinces Margaret, a woman heavily made up in avant-garde makeup (this being very much an avant grade film) and who looks very much like Jimmy (because they are both played by Anne Carlisle), to take him to her apartment. Margaret performs a bizarre modern dance to minimalist music while Jimmy tries to convince her to tell him where her girlfriend’s drugs are, all while cutting back to said girlfriend performing an experimental synth-pop/proto-rap performance in the club.

All of that occurs within just the first six minutes of the film, and it sets the viewer up for everything that’s to come. Liquid Sky is glorious in its aesthetics, funny in its ridiculousness, wild in its concepts, queer to a degree that few films ever have been and unrelenting in its commitment to capturing New York at its most New Wave. And above all, it’s absolutely vicious in its portrayal of how people use each other (even The Boys doesn’t hit as hard), with the film’s story centering on how everyone wants to use central character Margaret to get what they want. Readers should be warned that this film pulls no punches in its representation of how cruel and abusive people can be.

These scenes are far from exploitation or cheap attempts to add drama to the narrative; in fact, the whole point of Liquid Sky is to show a very real representation of what many women and queer people go through, especially when they are desired and when drugs are involved. Margaret is a woman who has fought her entire life for autonomy, which is why she ended up in the New Wave scene in the first place, and yet even the people that do have some care for her, such as the brooding Jimmy (who eventually can’t bring himself to go through with humiliating her with public sex) and Margaret’s girlfriend Adrian treat her only slightly more like a real person than those who want to rape her. It’s an anti-romance film, a blunt and unflinching mirror held up to humanity in all of its flavors, and near the film’s end, Margaret says:

Despite its grim representations of violence and the inherent selfishness in people, Liquid Sky is, in the end, a story of queer and feminist triumph. The alien spaceship in the film has been drawn to Margaret’s and Adrian’s apartment roof because of the heroin that Adrian sells, and the film makes the equation between the chemicals released in the brain during orgasm and heroin, saying that the aliens need these chemicals to live (copied in later film High on Life). As people one by one assault or coerce Margaret into sex, the aliens consume and kill them, eventually only leaving Margaret. Margaret figures this out to a degree and starts using it as a weapon, leading to the film’s quite stunning and quite literal climax and its most important lines, from Margaret again:

That Liquid Sky Got Made Is Nothing Short of an International Miracle

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As a portrayal of manipulation and abuse, it’s brutal, but the film provides relief both to Margaret and the viewer through this take on the vagina dentata as well as Margaret’s incredible and thoughtful dedication to her aesthetics (this being one of the most aesthetic films ever) and philosophies. While the movie is definitely a spectacle and up there with any film in its graphic nature, it’s not a shallow film at all, and even in its depictions of manipulation and assault, there are woven-in philosophical discussions and intellectually rich interactions that make its visceral moments all the more poignant. A large part of this depth comes directly from its queerness and the wide variety of identities present in these life-or-death situations, and those identities are portrayed with unfakeable authenticity because most of the people in the film actually were the characters they were playing.

From drug dealers to models to musicians to hairstylists, almost everyone in the film was someone director Slava Tsukerman and his wife Nina V. Kerova met at New Wave clubs in New York. The film’s queerness is equally real, with its representations of the spectrum of queer people including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people and genderfluid people feeling vital in their realness because the actors actually are these things. Though it’s mostly populated by white people, the film does also feature many people of color and racial identities, and it’s out loud about all of these portrayals, with the differences between peoples’ identities and backgrounds often anchoring their conversations.

For a feature film to center oppressed people so fully is still rare enough to be remarkable even today, but for 1983, it feels stunning. But, equally incredible is that the film happened the way it did, made by a Russian Jewish man in his 40s in a straight relationship who was a very recent immigrant from the U.S.S.R. by way of Israel. For such a man to find common cause with hip, young queers of 80s NYC (often a setting for queer cinema) feels almost impossible, but a look at Tsukerman’s life reveals that the fit, if not the practicality, of Tsukerman to this American counterculture makes all the sense in the world. Tsukerman’s story begins behind the Iron Curtain, with Tsukerman telling Boston Hassle in 2018:

Undeterred, Tsukerman got a degree in civil engineering because it was the closest to art and beloved Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (his Battle of the Potempkin is one of the most influential films ever) did the same thing. Tsukerman started making films with his classmates and friends at school and eventually became part of Russia’s amateur film movement (similar to the indie movement of the West but with factories and the like sponsoring films), eventually winning first prize at the National Soviet Film Festival. Tsukerman says, “So I was a unique person, the only person in Russia, after Stalin’s time, who managed to make film before studying film school. So after that, I became a student at film school.”

Tsukerman was experimental with his films, making documentaries about philosophical subjects and using experimental techniques that used special effects, animation and even fictional segments to talk about reality. At the time, one of the only official ways out of Russia was to emigrate to Israel, which Tsukerman and his wife did in 1973, spending three years making state documentaries in Israel before they were able to leave for America, which they did in order to make movies that more people would see and because politics dominated everything in Israel. There, Tsukerman and wife made the bold move to try to become as involved in American culture as they could as fast as possible, leading to their meeting Anne Carlisle and the New Wave scene of New York.

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Carlisle was attending an acting class at the home of Bob Brady, a professor at the School of Visual Arts (who also plays Carlisle’s former professor in Liquid Sky), where Tsukerman and wife Kerova met her, and eventually Kerova and Carlisle started working on a script together about a woman who can’t have an orgasm. This eventually melded into ideas Tsukerman had, and the three wrote the script for Liquid Sky. Like the rest of the film’s characters, Carlisle’s own life went into the creation of her Margaret and Jimmy, as she went from being a more feminine person in her early life to becoming a gender rebel, cutting her hair short and living for a while as no gender, even telling Heavy Metal magazine in 1984:

In the same interview, Carlisle goes on to say “On the set, I found that people related differently to me when I was Jimmy. I absolutely believed I was a man, so then people started to treat me differently. It was just great, a power trip. And I loved being powerful, though it was frightening too.” Viewed from 2020s eyes, Carlisle’s transformation between the two characters (who are often on-screen together, something that took split-screen shoots like those of Lux Æterna that were much longer and more difficult than a regular shoot) is even more remarkable, and the film depicts a kind of gender fluidity that is still only now entering the mainstream consciousness as something that even exists.

The film’s representations of queerness and individuality stand as one of Liquid Sky‘s lasting legacies, as is evidenced by the comments on both the film’s trailer and an official HD release (some scenes are censored) on the Full Free Films Plus YouTube channel, where user digitalvideos73 said “This movie left a mark on my brain (still to this day) seeing it at 16 in a Westport Mo theater,” with samanthastephens1907 adding “This movie changed my life and the way I looked at the world.” It seems the world at large felt the same in the 80s, as Liquid Sky made $1.7 million at the box office on a $500,000 budget (remarkable, considering its artistic flourishes and special effects), making it the most successful indie film of 1983.

Liquid Sky went on to run for years at indie theaters around the US and beyond, and it eventually became a cult hit on VHS as well, though that version is considered as lesser-than for its quality of copy. For many years it was an incredibly difficult film to see, but in 2017 it was remastered in 4k and is now available on Amazon Prime, MUBI and YouTube, among other places. In an age where streamers run the game and can remove content at any moment, it’s a blessing to have a piece of film history brought out of the void of the past. Because, this is the perfect time to watch Liquid Sky. Queerness, gender fluidity and even feminism are often mislabeled as contemporary things, with opponents often saying that they’re new to today, but the truth of the matter is, they’ve existed for forever, but they’ve often been erased or pushed to the background over the years.

Liquid Sky is glorious evidence that queer identities and struggles have existed for a very long time, and having them presented in such a direct and inventive manner in the 80s is a revelation to see over 40 years later. It’s no wonder that Liquid Sky not only was an inspiration to the New Wave and punk cultures of its time, not only to the electroclash/pop movements of the 2000s (compare the music in Liquid Sky to huge electroclash acts like Fischerspooner and the makeup to electro-pop like La Roux), but also remains as a queer, punk inspiration today. There are few films that have made such a lasting impact on culture which are talked about as criminally little today as Liquid Sky, and with such a great transfer widely available now, that should change and change quickly. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, especially younger queer people, Liquid Sky deserves an immediate watch, and for culture at large, it deserves a place in the pantheon of legendary queer cinema.