Boom For Real review: Intimate portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat

He was a ubiquitous presence, photographed and filmed on innumerable occasions, but there is barely a moment in the film in which we hear his own voice

The film centres on Basquiat's time as a graffiti artist working under the name Samo (Magnolia Pictures)

Dir: Sara Driver, 78 mins, featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexis Adler, Fab 5 Freddy, Patricia Field, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Michael Holman, Jim Jarmusch

Sara Driver’s documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat offers a portrait of the artist as a young hipster in the New York of the 1970s, when the city could no longer pay its bills. Lawlessness and violence abounded. A new bohemian subculture emerged in the chaos with the young Basquiat to the fore.

Driver, a filmmaker and producer who has worked very closely with her partner Jim Jarmusch over the last four decades, was in New York at the time. She knew the same people and was part of the same subculture as Basquiat.

The film therefore has a far more intimate feel than a documentary made by an outsider would have possessed. Jarmusch shares a charming story about the artist following him and Driver on the street and giving her a flower. We hear from his flatmates, patrons and fellow artists and musicians. Driver and her team have assembled countless photographs of the very photogenic Basquiat at the Mudd Club, or out on the streets.

The documentary deals with only a short period in its subject’s life, when he was spraying graffiti on the walls under the pseudonym Samo. At the time, he was living a rootless existence, sleeping on friends’ floors and plotting his future as an artist. Driver doesn’t lumber us with biographical details about Basquiat’s family background or what enabled him to turn, seemingly overnight, into a full blown sensation of the New York art world.

Nor does she deals with six or seven years before his untimely death in 1988 (aged only 27) when Basquiat was feted. She doesn’t get drawn into art world controversies either. There is no mention of Australian critic Robert Hughes, who lambasted Basquiat at every opportunity. Nor are there any sightings of Julian Schnabel, a friend of Basquiat in the latter years and who made a biopic about him.

This is an engaging, well-made film which benefits from its close focus on the artist at such a specific moment in his life. One frustration, though, is the lack of background information about where Basquiat came from or how, as a teenager, he was already so precocious and well informed. He was a ubiquitous presence, photographed and filmed on innumerable occasions, but there is barely a moment in the film in which we hear his own voice.

‘Boom for Real’ hits UK cinemas 22 June