Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Alternate title(s):
Foreign Title:
Date: January 01, 2017 to December 31, 2017
Dates Note: 2017
Country of Origin:
United States
Place of Origin: United States
Languages:
Color: B&W/Color
Silent: No
Based On:
Additional Info:
Curator Notes
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
Limited Engagements & Special Screenings 2018Description:
On the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s, New York City’s expansive urban blight proved to be the perfect petri dish for a thriving downtown art scene. Not yet twenty, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a ubiquitous and inspiring presence in a community that included Jim Jarmusch and this film’s director, Sara Driver. They and other veterans of the scene share recollections of Basquiat. Combining rarely seen early drawings, paintings, and writings with archival film and photographs, Boom for Real chronicles the emergence of the charming and prolific artist, musician, and poet for whom the city was both a canvas and a stage.
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
61st San Francisco International Film Festival at BAMPFADescription:
New York City in the 1970s was fractured, dynamic, and the perfect time and place for prolific graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to begin his famous SAMO tags around the city. Chronicling his life up to the time he sold his first painting, filmmaker Sara Driver interviews close friends, lovers, and collaborators to present a fresh and vibrant look at the young artist who was a reflection of his time and the city where he grew up.
“One of the most transporting depictions of the Downtown New York scene (in a field crowded with docs, memoirs, and fictions—some by artists who weren’t alive at the time), Sara Driver’s Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat more than does justice to its acknowledged subject, partly by refusing to divorce him from his context. Conveying his personal magnetism, eccentricity, and nonstop creativity without romanticizing him, the doc also serves as another chapter in the ongoing effort to rescue Basquiat from his own hype.”—John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter
“There’s a wandering element to Driver’s narrative. This isn’t surprising, coming from a filmmaker who has collaborated on similarly laconic Jarmusch work like Stranger Than Paradise and Permanent Vacation. . . . The best elements of Driver’s movie illustrate how these artists located the beauty in that ruin and made a great and turbulent racket in the quiet.”—Chris Barsanti, The Playlist
Related People
