Tamra Davis’ new Basquiat documentary offers a surprising wealth of first-hand footage of the artist. Tracing his chaotic rise to wealth, fame and exploitation, the film is centered around a 1985 interview at the L’Hermitage Hotel in Los Angeles – a city to which Basquiat would retreat in order to escape the drugs and leaching coterie that hounded him in New York. The interviews are exceptional, not just for the precious evasions he offers, but for his face, so obviously entranced with the camera, struggling to strike the right attitude for posterity, and the tender, recurring smile that wins out against his vanity. Davis gives us the gift of intimacy with Basquiat’s charisma; we become personally familiar with it, and this gives weight to the interviews (the list is pretty long – Schnabel, Bischofberger, Deitch, Fab 5 Freddy), as they establish again and again that with Basquiat it was always love at first sight. You knew right away that he would be famous.
This cult of personality was something the artist both courted and loathed. He felt critics focused too much on him and too little on his art – a problem made worse by an ongoing current of borderline racism (he was always the “wild man”, his art was “primal” even “primitive”). But Basquiat needed attention badly, and fought oppression with lucre, Armani suits et al.
Ultimately this is a movie for fans. As in Schnabel’s biopic, part of the pleasure is scene-porn centered around the downtown of the late 1980’s. There’s a good amount of footage from the Canal Zone and similar parties, in which an ecstatically goofy Michael Holman puts Basquiat’s cool in relief (soon after you get to see Jean-Michel dancing – he’s good). The interviews are sometimes great, if not for critical insight, then for detail – like the ability of some of his friends to date his paintings by the imprint his sneakers left when he would leave them scattered on the floor.
Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988, leaving behind a large body of work that continues to accrue a sense of relevancy and foresight. He was 27. This sort of loss is hard to do justice to, and thankfully the better interviews avoid schmaltz and panegyrizing. The best notes concerning his death are struck in a confessional tone. His friends all seemed to know what was going to happen, but were cowed by the artist’s imperious self-determination. Others were merely lost in the scene, or had other needs to attend to. Al Diaz, Basquiat’s graff partner, recalls a gift from Jean-Michel as he succumbed to alienation and the last drug binges that would kill him:
“He showed up to my apartment over on First Street, and he yelled [up to] the window, and he shows up with two paintings…with a dyptic. It said “To SAMO, from SAMO”, and like a creep, I turned around and I sold those paintings, yeah. (Interviewer: when he was still alive?). Yeah, when he was still alive.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is directed by Tamra Davis. It features interviews with Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn O’Brien, Maripol, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Annina Nosei, Suzanne Mallouk, Rene Ricard and Kenny Scharf among many others. The film opens July 21, 2010 at Film Forum.
