Jean-Michel Basquiat: The radiant child

Well, my first film at this year's Atlantic Film Festival turned out to be a winner. I don't know how wide a circulation this documentary will be getting, but if you have the chance to see it, I highly recommend not missing it, even if like me, you're not particularly involved with art or the art world. I had seen the earlier Julian Schnabel film simply called Basquiat, which isn't a documentary, and found it very compelling but now I really do prefer this one. We're lucky that the director, Tamra Davis, was a friend of Basquiat and filmed interviews and lots of other footage of him so that we get a rich picture of this amazingly talented, intelligent and sophisticated young man, who emerged from seemingly nowhere first as simply one of many graffiti artists in NYC and then became the darling of the art world and a close friend of Andy Warhol. Sadly, like many others he got involved in drugs and died of an overdose at the age of 27. I haven't heard why Davis waited till now, over 20 years later, to make this film, but she did a great job of putting it all together, including a wonderful jazz soundtrack that goes perfectly with the film.