It’s the first Basquiat film built around his family's archive, and it's also the first to penetrate the Basquiat mystique.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Courtesy of Tribeca Festival “Jean-Michel” is the Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary we’ve been waiting for — the fantastic one he deserves. Over the years, there have been a sprinkling of films built around Basquiat, like the boho vérité snapshot “Downtown 81” (2000) or “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat” (2018), which captured the period in the late ’70s after he’d broken with his family, when he was a scene-maker cultivating the seeds of his art and fame. Both those films are heady time capsules, and so, in a different way, is Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat” (1996), a biopic — starring the hypnotic Jeffrey Wright — that was way ahead of the curve in recognizing the poetic sway of Basquiat’s art and image.
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