Basquiat (1996)

I really like films about artists – I don’t know what it is, but they’re consistently quality. Usually, you have to wait a decent number of decades before you can make a film about a real one, you can’t just rush in like a sheepdog, you have to be a bit patient and let the test of time tell you who’s worth the celluloid. When films do get around to doing famous painters, or the odd sculptor for some reason, the sensible interval means we get cute little period pieces, sometimes costume dramas if it’s one of the proper good artists and not a modern one. But it’s different with JMB because it felt like more of a now or never situation. The chances were pretty slim that anyone was going to know who Basquiat was in another fifty years, let alone act like he was up there with Van Gogh or Picasso, so they couldn’t hang about. Less than ten years after he overdosed, along came his biopic (before there was even a biography) and that almost-decade wasn’t enough to stop it feeling like a rush-job.

At first glance, it looked like this would get some added authenticity from being directed by the other superstar painter of that era – it turns out, though, that’s where it all went wrong. Now we could disagree on Basquiat and still appreciate Basquiat but I wouldn’t worry about it because Julian Schnabel’s homage is so made-up that it’s basically a work of fiction that just borrows a famous name, which is pretty bold considering that everyone who knew the actual guy was still around, and means that at essentially no point in the film are you watching anything that actually happened. Who is this gallery owner who sends him away? Who is the agent that discovers him and loses him? Who is this guy who lets him use a studio in the middle of the night? Who are any of these people supposed to be? The characters are what we might call freely adapted from the source material.

You can tell right away this is apprentice work by Schnabel as director – it’s the sort of thing that passed for a cool indie film in the mid-90s, so it’s flat, studenty, dreary, and bumbles along with this anti-rhythm of stilted, loping scenes that have non-committal performances, unnatural pauses, and intermittent pans of the camera over artful mise-en-scene with a supposedly cool track playing. To say nothing of the bafflingly tacky skits of fantasy that open and close it. Everything about this is like carbon-dating for the year it was made, with a pile-on 90s cast including David Bowie doing a crap attempt at Warhol and forgotten it-girl Claire Forlani as “Gina” – Gina who? The made-up girlfriend character, that’s who. Basquiat was in fact banging everything with a pulse but the film pretends he was a tender flower who fell for a waitress and she was the love of his life. So sweet! Except, imaginary. All this is set to a tediously impeccable (wretched) 90s soundtrack, and I think we’ve all learned not to trust films that use Rolling Stones songs like they give you free cool points, how establishment can you get? Stylistically, there are some even worse lapses like the inflated tosh of a soprano singing over Basquiat’s beating or Bowie singing plaintively on some trifling deep cut of his as Basquiat merely wanders down the street, not to mention ending the film with Hallelujah. 

Basquiat has a couple of things to say. An artist confronted with racial bigotry is a topic of natural interest to Mr Schnabel, who thinks that anyone who doesn’t like his work is an anti-Semite, so he touches on that. But this is mainly a film about what it was like to become famous in the art-world at that time, a topic obviously of even more personal interest to Mr Schnabel. A lot more, that is, than Basquiat actually interests him, since most of the plot is invented, and we only see a few moments of the artist at work, with no sense of Basquiat’s discovery of his style or his development of it. I mean, it’s a terrible style and his paintings are dumb, but still, it would have been nice to get into it a bit since we’re here already. You get the feeling there’s some (a lot of) insider point-scoring and score-settling going on with real-world figures in the New York scene who we don’t even know, and that these things might be higher on Schnabel’s agenda than telling us much about his main rival, especially as the bubble had popped for his own (also shit) paintings.

Basquiat the character is presented at all times as an all-time genius, ofc, but to make sure we really love him he’s also an adorable 90s indie-movie waif-pixie. We see him talk gibberish as a cover for ruining his girlfriend’s artwork, and made-up Gina is given an entirely false cheesy response to it – angry, then.... touched by his poetic soul, and then... a little smile! because everyone has to find Basquiat irresistibly charming and forgivable no matter what, based on nothing. Great artists can be insufferable pricks and so can trivial ones surrounded by drugs and sycophants, but the second case doesn’t have people lining up to watch a film about it and the first case means you have to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time. This version tells us he was a great artist and an angel, so that’s a relief. Either way, the fictional adulation the characters give him has less to do with the feeding frenzy around the real man and more to do with the director's self-image using a black avatar. Schnabel is not known for being not-vain.

To pitch us the “Basquiat was a genius” part similarly calls for a bit of subtly herding us in the right direction – subtle, as in, all the characters immediately fall over themselves like they were touched by God when they see his lame scribbles and kiddie-level doodles, and you just have to roll with it, because so they did at the time. And you’re not going to get any pushback about that from Julian. Maybe that’s how starved they were for anything other than conceptualist bollocks back then, who knows. Neo-expressionism was awesome enough but it belonged to the Germans and Italians and the best thing to come out of the lacklustre American wing, which was mainly Julian Schnabel and Jean-MICHEL Basquiat, is not so much this film as Schnabel’s subsequent career as an above-average director.  

With no particular attention paid to any of the relationships, even the ones that never existed, there’s no pay off in the last part and it squibs out. Schnabel hasn’t quite mastered the organisation of a film at this point, much like me with film reviews. That would come later for him (I make no such promise). This decade was littered with directors given one or two chances to prove themselves with their “very personal” low-budget calling-cards and they made films just like this, very often set in New York, and were then ushered back out on to the street where they belonged. Schnabel evidently had enough of a name to just keep making films until he got the hang of it, a happy outcome when you see The Diving Bell & The Butterfly or his van Gogh film with a title I find impossible to remember because I always want to call it Heaven’s Gate but I know it’s not called that. If only there was some way for me to look it up.