Jean-Michel Basquiat was a pain in the neck. In the late 1970s and 80s he was without a fixed abode and spent a lot of time sleeping on other people’s sofas. Basquiat wasn’t averse to painting his housemates’ clothes and fridge, or dropping in at 3am, pumping industrial music on his boombox, much to the consternation of the building’s “super”. “He was a kid,” laughs Sara Driver, the creator of Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a documentary that recounts the early life and precocious times of the NYC street kid and nascent painter.
Drawing from interview and archive footage, as well as a remarkable cache of art and ephemera belonging to Basquiat’s former girlfriend Alexis Adler, it follows his life from his dropping out of high school through to the sale of his first major work and runs roughly from 1978 until 1981. “Before Reagan,” notes Driver, who recalls both the man and the period personally. “Everything changed after Reagan became president.”
For all of his aforementioned domestic failings, however, the artist had many saving graces. The Basquiat in Driver’s movie comes across as a gentleman, and also a bit of a ladies’ man. “He was hitting on everybody, he was a teenager,” says Driver. “And he was a really gorgeous person, really handsome; he really beamed from the inside out.”
Basquiat chose to surround himself with remarkably sharp, cultured friends, including Adler, a Barnard biology graduate, as well as film-maker Jim Jarmusch, writer Luc Sante and Andy Warhol confidant Glenn O’Brien.
“Everyone was about four to seven years older than him,” says Driver. “He was looking at Alexis’s science books and getting ideas for graphs and charts; he was absorbing literature from Luc and film from Jim. He really picked his own professors.”
While the recent Basquiat retrospective at London’s Barbican Centre exhibited the confident work of a man magnifying a turbulent period in American history, the documentary reveals that Basquiat took a while to establish himself as an artist. Indeed, he was more of a writer to begin with, penning poems on legal pads and gaining some notoriety with cryptic graffiti tagged “SAMO©” – texts, as one interviewee observes, that tended to appear in the artsy SoHo neighbourhood, perhaps because Basquiat knew whose attention he wanted to attract, even if he hadn’t settled on his métier. His noise band, Gray, were equally noteworthy, if a bit Spinal Tap at times. Fellow member Michael Holman describes building a geodesic dome for one of their performances at post-punk hangout the Mudd Club, in which the group – who included a young Vincent Gallo – were strapped into the structure’s upper reaches. Basquiat placed himself centre-stage by squeezing himself and his synthesizer into a Chinese shipping crate. “Well,” says Driver. “We were all there trying to entertain each other.”
The documentary also provides great insight into the way in which improved Xerox technology spurred on both Basquiat’s early postcard collage works and late 70s punk art in general.
“Artists were working in Xerox shops,” recalls Driver. “I worked in one, and so did Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. In fact, Thurston Moore worked there for a while, too. I could work in a Xerox shop, pay the month’s rent, and still make films. You didn’t have to make that much money in order to live and eat pizza every day – it was 25 cents a slice.”
Although the film focuses on the artist, it also describes a long-lost side of New York City. Lower Manhattan was rundown and lawless, but that lawlessness came at a price. The mob really did give away free heroin at the Mudd Club, in order to get its patrons hooked.
“There were people that were definitely placed in the community to promote heroin use,” remembers Driver. “Then when crack was invented right around the time of Reagan, that was even more efficient at killing people.”
Basquiat fatally overdosed in 1988, aged 27, although Driver ends her film much earlier, with the artist’s first successful sale to a major art-world figure: Henry Geldzahler, a former Met Museum curator who also had a hand in the early careers of David Hockney and Frank Stella. In fact, if there is one aspect of Basquiat’s life that lies oddly outside the documentary’s purview, it’s any sense of the artist’s origins and family life. Yet Driver explains that she had good reason to leave this out. “We never talked about our parents,” she says. “Nobody ever talked about their parents. We were all too busy making new tribes of our own.”
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat is in cinemas on Friday 22 June