How Long Is Now

By turns lyric and hypnotic, How Long is Now examines the delicate membranes separating past and present, authenticity of experience and transgressive truth. A Jewish-American writer, plagued by poetry and history, leaves his dying father and faithless marriage to travel to Germany and later Morocco to attend a William Burroughs conference, an unwritten novel on his plate. Enter a mysterious film, a cocktail of wild characters, and a fractured narrative that attempts a reimagining of his parents’ early courtship while his own life destabilizes into a sad, metaphysical travelogue, and we’re left beguiled by the wondrous, bitter nature of a reality that’s more cut-up than consistent, a Beckett play on deepening failure and paranoia. Hope is not lost, however—it just comes with a price—and as we’re ushered through a lengthening series of psychological obstacles and aesthetic quandaries, we come closer to understanding what that price may be.
Joe Pan