When we first meet Basquiat he's rising from the cardboard box where he lives. Graffiti bomber, tagging Samo, perhaps-but, more importantly, he's a feral genius looking for a more legit canvas. His ascent is meteoric. A ready introduction to Warhol (David Bowie) and Basquiat becomes the prized savage in a lily-white eighties art world. Jeffrey Wright's Basquiat is a cranky manchild, waiflike but with a hidden ferocity. He has a facile smile that thickens under the heartless glare of the Soho scene. And it certainly is the scene that director Schnabel knows. A star painter of the overheated eighties, he renders the power pack-Mary Boone (Parker Posey), Bruno Bischofberger (Dennis Hopper), et al-with sardonic hues, going so far as to picture himself in the guise of Albert Milo (Gary Oldman), a wisdom-laden louse in a cloistered studio domicile. Mincingly mythopoeic, Basquiat shows us the artist as wild child, tamed then destroyed by the crass machinery of culture.-Steve Seid