Documentary exploring the pre-fame years of celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and how New York City shaped him as a...
Documentary exploring the pre-fame years of celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and how New York City shaped him as a person.
"Sara Driver’s documentary is both a celebration of and elegy for the downtown New York art/music/film/performance world of the late 1970s and early ’80s, through which Jean-Michel Basquiat shot like a rocket. Weaving Basquiat’s life and artistic progress in and out of her rich, living tapestry of this endlessly cross-fertilizing scene, Driver has created an urgent recollection of freedom and the aesthetic of poverty. Graffiti meets gestural painting, hip hop infects rock and roll and visa versa, heroin comes and never quite goes, night swallows day, and everybody looms as large as they feel like looming on the crumbling streets of the Lower East Side." (New York Film Festival)
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88 %52 reviewsRotten Tomatoes® rating
57 %87 reviewsAudience score rating
""Boom for Real" pinpoints the moment when the graffiti world pivoted, without knowing it, into the art world."
Variety"Basquiat's art - raw, inventive, socially engaged - continues to speak to us even as the artist himself cannot."
The New York Times"The film doesn't quite get under Basquiat's skin, but does a thorough job of reconstructing that forgotten city of late-70s New York in which Basquiat came of age."
The Guardian"What's refreshing about Sara Driver's look-back documentary...is the frisky, contemplative, ground-level angle it takes on its hype-magnet of a subject."
Los Angeles Times"A treasure for those interested in Downtown New York's heyday and a demythologised Basquiat."
Hollywood ReporterBoom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat | Details
- Runtime
- 78
- Genre
- Documentary
- Country of origin
- USA
