Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #99 Basquiat (1996)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah. All that’s left is Peckinpah’s blood-soaked war movie Cross of Iron and I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.

There is a spiritual frequency detectable only to true creative geniuses. David Bowie was uniquely attuned to this otherworldly frequency, this strange gift from the God of Art. So was Andy Warhol, who looked at the world in such a unique and original way that it changed the way we experience this crazy postmodern stunt known as life. 

And Jean-Michel Basquiat was most assuredly plugged into this strange frequency as well. That’s what makes the casting of David Bowie as Andy Warhol in a Jean-Michel Basquiat so perfect. 

Painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel basically got EVERYBODY to appear in his directorial debut. It’s so obscenely, absurdly star-studded that it’s almost easier to say who isn’t in the movie who you think might be: Steve Buscemi. That’s pretty much it. He’s not in Basquiat but pretty much everyone else is. 

Basquiat is like the It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of 1990s independent art biographies. It boasts more stars than there are in the heavens. Bowie! Jeffrey Wright, in a career-making performance! A young, fiendishly magnetic Benicio Del Toro! Dennis Hopper! Gary Oldman! Independent film It Girl Parker Posey! Paul Bartel! Tatum O’Neal! Courtney Love! William Dafoe! Christopher Walken! A young Sam Rockwell. 

Claire Forlani is also in the cast. 

The endless parade of famous faces can be a little exhausting and a little distracting. The simultaneously somber and histrionic melodrama of Basquiat comes in no small part from the painter getting lost in a world of fame and glamour and money and the dangers of celebrity. Yet the film itself is perpetually in danger of being overwhelmed by the star-power in front of the camera and on the Tom Waits and Rolling Stones-intensive soundtrack. 

Jeffrey Wright is similarly powerfully in sync with the genius frequency. Like Bowie playing Warhol, he isn’t just a genius playing a simpatico genius so much as he’s channeling the ineffable essence of a cultural titan.

Basquiat opens with its subject literally living in a cardboard box, the ultimate expression of urban poverty. From the very beginning it is apparent that Schnabel is more interested in myth-making than in psychological realism or truth. 

Incidentally, that’s also what Basquiat would shout while experiencing an orgasm.

Wright plays Basquiat as a natural who doesn’t just create art that angrily demands to be seen and appreciated; he lives his art as well. For Basquiat, creating comes as easily as breathing, as eating, as getting fucked up. 

The buildings and subways and walls of New York aren’t just the artist’s inspiration; they’re his canvas as well. As graffiti artist Samo, Basquiat leaves an indelible mark on the city, creating a legacy rich with irony, sarcasm, social commentary, dark comedy and soul-deep pain. 

Basquiat is explosively, precociously talented, a bona fide original voice in an art world desperately in need of fresh blood but he looked the part as well. With his long, elegant fingers perpetually cradling a cigarette or joint, wild hair and delicate features, Wright’s Basquiat isn’t just handsome or good-looking: he’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful, model-gorgeous.

The preposterously gifted young painter came of age creatively and emotionally in a New York bursting with creativity and life and music and sex and art. Graffiti and Hip Hop were bursting out of the underground into the mainstream and black and white culture were blurring and overlapping and coming together in exciting, revolutionary ways.

Basquiat was intimately involved with graffiti and Hip Hop in its exhilarating youth but Schnabel short-changes those aspects of his life, as as well as his complicated sexuality, in favor of the elements of his early career that overlap with his own. 

This includes the fairly central presence of a fictionalized Schnabel figure in the form of Albert Milo (Gary Oldman), a lovely and supportive (not to mention handsome!) friend and committed family man. 

The presence of an idealized director’s surrogate reminded me of Bob Zmuda’s probably false but intriguing contention that Danny DeVito made Man on the Moon so that he could re-write the historical record to depict himself in a more positive, supportive light. 

The wildly charismatic and achingly cool Basquiat enjoys a rocket ride to the apex of the 1980s New York art scene with a little help from friends and supporters Milo, Bruno Bischofberger (Dennis Hopper) and Andy Warhol (Bowie). 

David Bowie, silver screen, can’t tell them apart at all

Basquiat’s rapid ascent to superstardom and the spoils of celebrity, particularly in terms of drugs and sex complicate and ultimately destroy his relationship with Gina Cardinale (Claire Forlani), a good girl and early supporter Basquiat loves but not enough to overcome his vices or tame his demons. 

The wan romance between Basquiat and Gina feels more like an extended and unfortunately successful attempt to avoid addressing the complications and complexities of the countercultural icon’s sexuality than an effort to explore it. 

The nice girlfriend left behind in the mad pursuit of fame is a biopic cliche. It is far from the only one Schnabel’s often powerful, frequently overwrought and exceedingly sentimental movie exploits.

In Basquiat, the maverick art world sensation uses his voice and his paintbrush to try to escape from the prisons of racism, trauma and other people’s perceptions of him and his paintings, perceptions shaped and molded by colonialism and racism of a thousand different varieties, from vicious anti-black racism to the condescension, fetishization and cooption of well-meaning white Liberals. 

But fame proves a prison all its own, all the more scarring and painful because it looks so much like freedom and power from the outside. 

Fame makes it hard for Basquiat to know who to trust but he falls into a deep and abiding friendship with Warhol, who appreciated both his extraordinary talent and his remarkable personality. 

Despite being separated by decades and race, the young upstart and the god of pop art form a genuine bond. Wearing Warhol’s actual wig, jacket and glasses, Bowie captures the way Warhol was at once the biggest star in any room and a quintessential passive observer who made banality fascinating in his art and in what passed for his private life as well. 

Warhol proves an unlikely father figure to the impressionable and deeply sad young man. When Warhol dies his protege spins out of control and drifts deeper and deeper into the drug addiction that will ultimately take his life at 27, in keeping with his status as perhaps the preeminent rock star of the art world, its Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis. 

Addiction simplifies life in the most awful possible way, reducing existence to an endless hunt to stay high forever without tipping over into oblivion. 

The fatal flaw with most movies about drug addicts is that they turn complicated, complex, multi-dimensional figures into the same one-size-fits-all junkie shambling into the gutter or lurching towards death in a heroin haze. 

Basquiat is certainly guilty of that to a certain extent in its bleary, bleak third act but the brilliance of Wright’s extraordinary performance lies in its specificity. 

The title character is high pretty much throughout the duration of Basquiat but there’s always something going on inside his beautiful, doomed mind and body beyond intoxication. 

Wright refuses to let Basquiat’s addiction define him but as the character descends further and further into darkness and the loneliness of heroin addiction it becomes a struggle not to fall into morbid cliche. 

Basquiat established Schnabel as a natural filmmaker adept at combining music, image and editing to create something sad and dreamlike, ethereal and lyrical, melancholy and musical. At its best, Basquiat is pure cinema, pure jazz, pure visual poetry. 

Watching Basquiat I couldn’t help but feel like it is a very straight white take on a fundamentally black, queer story about the insidious forms anti-black racism takes that is itself informed inextricably and negatively by the race of its director and auteur. 

In telling Basquiat’s story Schnabel also tells his own, metaphorically and literally, and I can’t help but think that a figure as important and enduring as Basquiat deserves a spotlight all his own, not one where white faces and white voices keep crowding into the frame. 

Wright and Bowie are so good here that I found myself wishing that someone would make a mismatched buddy cop movie with them reprising their roles as Basquiat and Warhol. With mismatched buddy cop movies, cliches aren’t just expected: they’re angrily demanded, whereas Basquiat’s weakness for the groaning conventions of biopics and movies about junkies keeps it from realizing its full potential. 

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