J Paul Johnson
Make no means about it, painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat has earned its reputation as a flawed film. Something of a highly subjective arthouse-indie biopic, Basquiat managed to shed more light on Schnabel’s artistry than his subject’s, the celebrated street artist Jean-Michele Basquiat, whose work rose from the streets of New York City to international galleries and fame before his death at the age of 27 in 1988. Schnabel’s 1996 film boasted an incredible cast led by Jeffrey Wright in the title role and a faithful representation of Basquiat’s work but somehow managed to capture the attention of next to no one, generating mixed reviews and next to no box office beyond earning back its $3 million budget. But Janus Films has re-mastered and restored the film—originally released in color—in a new 4K black and white release supervised by Schnabel for selected theaters nationwide, giving Basquiat an entirely new aesthetic and meriting a re-appraisal.
Basquiat debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in 1996 before its US theatrical release and heralded star Jeffrey Wright—looking almost impossibly, unrecognizably young here, if no less bemused and beleaguered than he would three decades later in American Fiction—as a talent for the future. It was Wright’s first starring role, and he plays Basquiat with a shy, sly charm that masks the artist’s strong will and even stronger artistic drive. His is an excellent, riveting performance, one that earned Wright plenty of acclaim and accolades, though it’s not quite sufficient to invest the film’s dawdling narrative with any urgency.
Like so many biopics, Basquiat falls prey to a common flaw: mistaking the events of the subject’s life for a coherent narrative based on a character’s motivations. We see Basquiat hang with fellow artists, woo a waitress, have an affair on the side, mix and mingle in the NYC gallery scene, indulge and suffer patrons, fall prey to the addiction to drugs that would later take his life and, yes—paint, first using graffiti in the streets and then appropriating poetry, drawing, and painting in often oblique yet sharply pointed messaging mixing media in surprising, impactful ways for which he ultimately became famous. (To give novices a sense of how famous, particularly posthumously, a few years back one of his works sold for a record $110 million, the most ever for a US artist.)
Along the way, Wright’s performance as Basquiat is supported by equally excellent performances by an incredible supporting cast: Gary Oldman as a stand-in for Schnabel himself, a colleague and contemporary of Basquiat’s; Michael Wincott as the poet and critic Rene Ricard, Dennis Hopper as Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger; and Parker Posey as gallery owner Mary Boone. Claire Forlani, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Courtney Love, Tatum O’Neal, and Benicio del Toro all play slightly fictionalized composite characters. Everyone, especially Forlani, del Toro, Wincott, and Oldman are excellent (and O’Neal one damned good sport); David Bowie is, surprisingly, the one sour note here as Andy Warhol, hiding behind a wig and a Polaroid with next to nothing to say or contribute.
What one never really quite gets from Schnabel’s version of Basquiat, though, is what drives his subject. What motivates the artist to create what he creates, a vision both timely and unique, riding the crest of the bright, burgeoning hip hop movement and taking art to the streets. Wright’s performance, good as it is, never quite articulates where his Basquiat is headed or why he wants to do what he does. Schnabel’s script and direction tend to mistake the events and characters of his subjects’ life for motivations, rendering Wright’s Basquiat as an artist largely without agency, simply pulled in different directions by those who like, love, or loathe him, who offer patronage, succor, sex, or drugs.
In Janus’s 4K black and white restoration and at some remove from its original release, though, Basquiat deserves a new look. The artist’s rich depiction of street life, often as it did using bright hues and mixed media, does not suffer at all in the chiaroscuro of the new restoration; rather, it sparkles and shines, and in black and white Basquiat looks ever more the idiosyncratic arthouse pic Schnabel must have imagined, with his Breathless-inspired jump cuts and artsy transitional insets. Whatever one thinks of presenting its subject’s colorful art in black and white, Basquiat still boasts an incredible cast and soundtrack, and even more so, in 2024, it is today an all-too-timely reminder of the savage passage of time, featuring not only a subject who passed too soon, but also that of the film’s now-passed co-stars Bowie and Hopper, and as well of a time and place, the bustling art and hip-hop world that was the 1980s art scene where a radical new aesthetics was underway with Jean-Michele Basquiat at its turbulent epicenter.
