Review: Tamra Davis’s ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child’
By Guest Contributor Rob Fields, cross-posted from Bold As Love
Tamra Davis’ film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is an affecting documentary on the rise and fall of the artworld superstar. Davis was a friend of Basquiat’s who started filming interviews with him as their friendship developed. She’d amassed a significant amount of footage by the time of his death but, as she says, she put the film in a drawer and didn’t think about it for many years. What you get is wonderful interview footage of with Basquiat, as well as many of the people he was close to in those years of his ascent and decline. And, the film is well worth seeing, if only for the amount of his work that is shown.
But I don’t think there’s ever a way to watch a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat and not feel that impending sense of dread. I certainly remember feeling that while watching Jeffrey Wright in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, and I definitely felt it while watching one, too. The whole experience of watching the film, for me, is poignant. Usually, it’s because we recognize potential that is smothered by death at a young age. In this case, it’s watching him produce so much of his prodigious body of work and wanting him to be around to enjoy the acclaim that really followed him after his death that, yet again, I found myself hoping against reason that somehow this story would turn out differently and he wouldn’t be dead by age 27.
Of course, I can’t help but feel the inevitable even more sharply because I watch the movie as a black man. And I think the film does a great job of tackling the race issue head-on. But, the fact was, there seemed to be very few people around Basquiat who cared about him beyond what he could produce and what they could profit from. He had a meteoric rise: In two years, he’d gone from living hand-to-mouth on the street and crashing at different people’s apartments to an art world sensation. He had no support system when things really got deep. No one to pull him back from the drugs. And by then, there was the pressure to continue to produce masterpieces. I’m not quoting it exactly, but he’s said to have remarked, “They say the drugs are killing me, and I should stop. But then the works suffers and they’ll talk about me.” Yeah, it was a vicious and fickle environment.
There was a scene in Schnabel’s film where, towards the end, Basquiat, very much down on his luck, fighting his drug addiction—and you can see it in the splotches on his face—visits Schnabel at the SoHo loft he lives in. Schnabel’s paintings are all over the place. Things look comfortable, and they were. Basquiat looks as if he hasn’t eaten in a while, so Schnabel fixes him a plate of pasta. Schnabel’s daughter, I think, comes in, he says something to her and pats her on the heads, and then she trots aways. The contrast between the two men’s situations was always painful. After all, Schnabel was, at one point, an art world darling, a superstar in his own right. But these two ended up in very different places. For all the excesses, the partying, the drugs, I always felt there was probably a community around Schnabel that would never have let him slip over the edge. And he knew it. There he was, sitting securely up there in that loft, with his family and his presumption and his privilege intact. I hated Julian Schnabel for a while after seeing that.
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