I feel so much hipper after watching this documentary about Basquiat, the Haitian-Puerto Rican-American graffiti painter turned international art star. Directed by Basquiat's friend Tamra Davis, this is a loving portrait of the artist as a young man. I had liked the 1996 movie directed by another of Basquiat's friends, artist Julian Schnabel (who is in the documentary), in which Jeffrey Wright gave a fictionalized portrayal of the mercurial painter. This one has a good deal of footage of Basquiat himself, painting, dancing (occasionally at the same time), and speaking with Davis (who has directed episodes of various TV series as well as other documentaries and the movie Billy Madison (1995), among others), mixed in with interviews with people close to him and other vintage photography of the 1970s and 80s. The interview with Basquiat was originally a documentary short in 2006, and Davis met backers who asked her to flesh it out into a feature length doc. The poor radiant child (the term is from the title of an article about Basquiat by René Ricard, also in the doc) died of a heroin overdose in 1988 (six months after the death of his good friend and mentor Andy Warhol) at age 27, the same age as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were in 1970 and Jim Morrison in 1971. This is not Ray (2004) or Walk the Line (2005), in which we saw the artists' druggy decline, however. This is a mostly upbeat hour and a half about the mostly upbeat guy who mostly loved what he did. Langston Hughes' poem Genius Child is featured at both beginning and end.
The trailer and the movie start with Dizzy Gillespie's jazz classic Salt Peanuts, and there is a prodigious number of wonderful music clips (listed on this page) from a wide variety of musical genres. The movie will be released on DVD October 26. Jack and I recommend you watch it.
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