The last time Oliver Sacks was a character in a movie, his name had been changed. Robin Williams played "Dr. Malcolm Sayer" in Awakenings, a stand-in for the neurologist who wrote the book. Thirty-odd years later, Sacks is getting played under his own name, and the film isn't about his patients at all. It's about the man he fell in love with late in life.
What's been announced
Bill Nighy will play Sacks and Jonathan Bailey will play the writer and photographer Bill Hayes in Insomniac City, an adaptation of Hayes's 2017 memoir. Variety broke the news on November 9, and the details have since been confirmed across several outlets.
Dominic Cooke directs from a script he co-wrote with Hayes himself. Bailey is also a producer, alongside Troy Lum and Andrew Mason of Brouhaha Entertainment, Mike Goodridge, and Gabrielle Tana. Altitude is handling worldwide sales and is introducing the project to buyers at the American Film Market this week. There's no distributor, shoot date, or release date yet.
The story follows Hayes after he moves from San Francisco to New York following the sudden death of his longtime partner, and falls, unexpectedly, for both the city and Sacks, who was nearly 30 years his senior. Cooke calls it "a love letter to New York City itself," and the filmmakers' pitch line is an "intimate and uplifting portrait of grief, hope, community and second chances."
Oliver Sacks in 1985. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, public domain, via Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons. Featured image: Bill Nighy at the 2020 Berlinale, photo by Harald Krichel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Why this pairing works on paper
The age gap is the point, so the casting has to sell it, and Nighy is the right kind of choice. He's spent the last few years doing his most delicate work: Living earned him an Oscar nomination for playing a man reckoning with how little time is left. Sacks in his final years was in a similar place, and he was famously shy, which suits Nighy's habit of underplaying.
Bailey, meanwhile, has been steering toward exactly this kind of role. Fellow Travelers showed he could carry a serious queer love story with real weight, and producing this one suggests he went looking for it rather than waiting for a blockbuster gap in the schedule. If you want the source before the film, Hayes's memoir [AFFILIATE: Insomniac City by Bill Hayes (2017) — the book the film adapts] is a short, warm read built from Hayes's journal entries and street photographs.
The director is the interesting variable
Cooke came from theatre, running London's Royal Court before moving to film with On Chesil Beach and The Courier. Both are restrained, actor-first films about people who can't quite say what they mean, which is a decent fit for a romance between two private men. The risk is the same restraint making it feel airless. A movie pitched as a love letter to New York needs some street life in it, and that's where Hayes's own photographs could do a lot of work if Cooke leans on them.
Sacks wrote about his relationship with Hayes only near the end, in his memoir On the Move, published shortly before he died in 2015. A film that treats that late openness as the story, rather than a footnote to a famous career, could be something special.