Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (Tuesday, July 27, 2010) (85)

The opening sequence of The Radiant Child shows a few title cards where director Tamra Davis explains how the film got started. She writes that she was a friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early- and mid-1980s, and interviewed him in 1986. After the interview she put the footage aside for awhile not knowing what to do with it. When he died of a drug overdose in 1988, she decided to put the interview away and not use it. Recently she came back to the footage deciding she could do something with it now.

In this introduction, Davis leads us to believe that this film would be based on her interview with Basquiat, maybe leading us to new insights from the never-before-seen reels. What we get though is really nothing of the sort; this is a pure bio-doc, and a very good one at that. Through interviews with contemporaries, ex-girlfriends, art critics, downtown scenesters and friends, not to mention the 1986 interview, we see a very thorough and clear picture of this brilliant, troubled artist.

I am interested by the fact that in all the years I studied art history and have admired Basquiat's work - and felt very viscerally affected by it - I have always felt the need to "understand" it better. The mystery in the layers and layers of paint, images and text always bemused me; I wanted to get to a deeper level with the works, always feeling left somewhat on the outside. This film, in explaining who he was and how he worked, showed me that there is no real "deeper" understanding of this work. His work is almost purely emotional with touch points of (sometimes obscure) cultural literacy and identity peppered throughout.

At one point in the interview he speaks about how when he goes to paint, he turns on the television "for source material". This is totally revelatory to me. What might seem like a trite or cute line by a young artist working today, totally encapsulates how I would understand his work now. Yes, there are many levels to his work, but like with a television, there's a lot of stuff that is there that you don't need to worry about. His work is a cypher for the cultural world.

Davies employs a great soundtrack in the film, much of it being the artists and musicians who were in the same downtown scene that Basquiat was in (Blondie, the Velvet Underground), some being music of the era that might not have been downtown per se (early hip hop from the Bronx), and lots of be-bop, which Basquiat listened to constantly. The use of the bop here really underlines how much his paintings have in common with that style. That Charlie Parker or Dizzie Gillespie could improvise and chop up standards into smaller interesting bits is very similar to the technical and aesthetic qualities of Basquiat's work.

The film is really wonderfully directed. It moves along very smoothly and seems to tell his whole life story, getting into his psychology relating to his complicated relationship with his parents, showing how he came on the scene with tons of talent and no access and became a millionaire looking to become friends with the cool kids (Andy Warhol). Davis cuts the film beautifully, especially the montages showing his paintings and still photographs of him working in the studio.

I don't know why she started the film with this suggestion that it would use her '86 interview so much, because we really only get about 10 or 15 minutes of it at most (and most of it is not very interesting as he's clearly rolling on heroin during it). This documentary really is a great work of biography and is illuminating, even for an art lover like myself.

Stars: 3 of 4