‘Nova ‘78’ Review: Hippies, Beats, and Art Punks Unite in Must-See Doc About A Fascinatingly Ramshackle William S. Burroughs Festival [Doc Fortnight]

Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them.

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What viewers see of the event itself seems to fall somewhere between a train wreck and an indescribable thing people couldn’t stop talking about for the rest of their lives. Working from recently discovered footage shot by Brookner’s father, Howard, the filmmakers do little to set the scene, aside from a just-the-facts title card. Backstage footage shows Burroughs sitting quietly as the organizers organize. Asked what he thinks of this gathering in his honor, the stoic writer’s only response is a slightly frowning twitch of his lips. 

Viewers with no knowledge of who Burroughs is or why everyone from Phillip Glass to Frank Zappa would trek to an old off-Broadway theater in the East Village to perform in his honor will be mystified. But anybody who has attended arts festivals will recognize the broad strokes of what they see on screen at Nova: an overabundance of bold-face names showing up for a grab-bag of a thing whose roll-the-dice randomness delivers sublime episodes alongside scenes best left in history’s capacious dustbin.

The transcendent and transgressive impact of Burroughs’ 1959 violently surreal satirical novel “Naked Lunch” was still being discovered by new fans at the time of the Nova Festival. This created a rare fusion of counter cultures uniting for different reasons. Luminaries of the Beat movement, like Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, were yoked together by Nova with Sixties longhairs like Zappa and Timothy Leary alongside nascent punks and No Wave avant-gardists such as Smith and Laurie Anderson. The result is less a passing of the guard than it is a snapshot of a hinge time when all three strains of undergroundism—the Beats’ free-jazz lyricism, the hippies’ love of anything trippy the squares tried to ban, and the punks’ aggro blankness—could briefly co-exist under one roof.

Burroughs provides some of the festival’s enlivening moments, along with more quizzical ones. Early on, we see Burroughs, playing his recurring antihero character, Dr. Benway, awkwardly working through a campy, blood-and-guts-filmed skit about a botched appendectomy. More effectively, he reads a stark and pointed denunciation of California’s Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that, if it had not failed, would have forced school boards to fire all openly gay teachers. The piece has a punch not only for being a relatively rare openly political statement from Burroughs (who elsewhere in the film notes “we are a precarious minority”), but for prefiguring the agendas of control and discrimination to come in the following decade. 

Elsewhere, the offerings are similarly mixed. Anne Waldman delivers aggressively uncomfortable protest verse (“I poet word woman”) not long before Merce Cunningham performs noodling mime dance accompanied by John Cage vocals, leading into Glass’s gorgeously repetitive, accelerating synthesizer swoons. Smith and Lenny Kaye present a stark shredder of a music poem about Jim Morrison (a confusing choice, given that Smith could have done something better aligned to the event, since she had had a close relationship with Burroughs for years). Anderson delivers a surprisingly funny, robotically modulated rendition of a passenger plane about to crash. Perhaps the nadir comes when Zappa, just after reminding the crowd, “I’m not a fan of reading,” delivers the talking sphincter routine from “Naked Lunch,” which is true to form for his generally sub-juvenile humor but not essential viewing. Performance-wise, the film features more writers than musicians—either intentionally or simply because Howard Brookner and his crew (which included Jim Jarmusch) were there to capture—so an evening of Nova-connected shows by the B-52s and Suicide is unfortunately not included.

The randomness of the material aligns with the baggy nature of Nova’s organizing principle, which seems to have been variations on a theme about Burrough’s ideas on space, word virality, and social control. What gives ‘Nova ‘78’ its kick, though, is what the filmmakers find along and outside the performances. Street scenes around the East Village and Bowery show a more mundane take on late-1970s downtown than is often seen, looking grey and flat, like a canvas waiting for its brush, rather than the gangland warzone or artsy playground often presented in throwback gritty New York fantasias. Scenes of Burroughs goofing around with a pistol have a definite chill, given his fatal shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, almost four decades prior. 

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Unintentionally relevant for when the film screened at the 2026 MoMA Doc Fortnight, though, is a seemingly throwaway backstage moment. A roomful of Nova performers and organizers is captured digesting the ongoing Iranian Revolution (the Shah would flee Iran only weeks later). Burroughs, speaking with the same slashing anger that propelled his Proposition 6 broadside and prophetic tone that underlay pieces like “Thanksgiving Prayer,” predicts what the surging theocratic revolutionaries would do, using the tone of infuriated disgust he reserved for authoritarians of any stripe. Nearly a half-century after the revolution, as bombs and rockets crisscross the Middle East, Burroughs’ off-the-cuff backroom commentary registers almost more than anything else shown on stage in this curiously essential document of a time when things were changing more than anyone could comprehend. [B+]

Chris Barsanti

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