Tamra Davis, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child" (2010)
By Jean-Michel Basquait
Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to fame in the early ‘80s as a painter with bright strong flashes of color, streaks of black, jagged, oddly angled heads and crossed-out words, then died of a heroin overdose at age 27. His story has been told many times before—in Glenn O’Brien’s loosely crafted 1981 fiction film Downtown 81 (aka New York Beat) about a Village artist struggling to pay the bills; in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright’s alternately shambling and alert performance in the lead; and in at least seven books, including Phoebe Hoban’s journalistic 1998 biography Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. Now he is the subject of friend Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, which announces its intentions to uphold its subject’s legacy from the title onward. The film is framed inside and between an interview Davis filmed with Basquiat a few years before he died, a neat structuring device that allows him to speak for himself. But Basquiat also proves inarticulate on many points (clamming up about what his work means, for instance), and so the movie intercedes on his behalf. Beginning and ending with the Langston Hughes poem “Genius Child”…
Watch Tamra Davis, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child" on Fast Ubu