Basquiat . Austin Chronicle . 06-20-97

Basquiat

DIRECTED BY: Julian Schnabel

REVIEWED: 06-20-97

You can tell that Basquiat, the film, was put together by a fellow painter and friend. The narrative thread seems to assume quite a bit of intimate knowledge about Jean Michel Basquiat (played by Angels in America's Jeffrey Wright, who won a Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics' Circle awards for the role), the man, in order to truly understand what actually happened in his life, information that only friends and art historians would have about the young Haitian artist who died in 1988 at 27. While this makes the film hard to follow in a traditional storyline sense and leaves unanswered some of the more troubling aspects of Basquiat's meteoric rise to the inner circle of the early Eighties New York City art scene, the strong impressions that Schnabel is able to achieve through visual structure and editing combine to create a film persona for Basquiat that is haunting and precise, which left this particular critic in tears by the film's end.

Jefffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper in Julain Schnabel's Basquiat. The wig Bowie is wearing as he portryas Andy Warhol is only slightly better that the one Warhol actually wore.

--Adrienne Martini

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