Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the New York downtown art scene in the late 1970s. He left his family’s Brooklyn home in 1975, at age 15, and led a vagabond life, finding refuge with friends and lovers. He repaid their hospitality by transforming domestic objects, from doors to refrigerators, into art. Sara Driver’s film focuses on this early period, showing the relationship between the then-nascent culture of graffiti, tags and drawings on the subway cars and the first works of the writer Basquiat who, under the pseudonym SAMO, wrote extravagant poems on walls. The links between the young conceptual tagger and the hip hop scene of the time are told, among others, by director Jim Jarmusch and rapper Fab Five Freddy who (with muralist Lee Quiñones and Al Diaz) helped make the SAMO tag famous before Basquiat claimed it as his own. Faithful to its title, the film excludes the artist’s childhood and family relationships, shows Basquiat as an almost alien entity who appeared out of nowhere on the Lower East Side, determined to have his say in every artistic field, from painting to music: he paints clothes for costume designer Patricia Field, forms an avant-garde band with Michael Holman (one of the screenwriters of Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat) and parties with everyone at Mudd Club and Club 57. A figure destined to permanently change the city’s face and earn a place among the great American artists of the twentieth century.