Basquiat, a teenager in New York is not a traditional biopic. This sensitive film shows us his beginnings.
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Broadcast on January 20 at 9:10 p.m. on France 4
New York, 1975. The city is dying, riddled with debt, abandoned by the state, fled by the middle class. Violence and crime are on the rise. Its dilapidated decor becomes the cradle of the underground. Artists cover its walls and subways with graffiti, do drugs and party in its abandoned buildings, live punk, free, bohemian, together. And create. Sara Driver, the director of the documentary, speaks knowingly, she was there. She lived the El Dorado of Warhol’s Big Apple.
When in 2017 she decides to tell this time through one of her main heroes, she searches her archives and goes to find her accomplices, so that they share their memories of Basquiat the shooting star. We will see the street artist Al Diaz, Jim Jarmusch, companion of Sara Driver, then the other disappeared, the relatives… By small touches, by successive evocations, the filmmaker brings the painter back to life, in his SAMO period (like “Same Old Shit” , signature he affixed to his graffiti). We discover it at 17 years old. The angel-faced youth lives on the street. He covers lower Manhattan with drawings and feverish aphorisms, which strike passers-by and stick in your head. We will see how the scribbles become works. How success happens. How the work feverish… The sequence will not go until the explosion of success, the piles of banknotes in the apartment and the addictions which mark the last years of the too short life of the painter (still a member of the club of 27). She stops when the galleries open their doors to her and everything still seems possible. Poetic, whimsical, this tribute fascinates and moves, like an evocation of a crazy and hard time, a firework of black light. You don’t need to be an expert in contemporary art to savor these images… but it might make you want to become one.
