Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Boom for Real revisits the gritty, burned-out streets of the East Village in the late ’70s, when recent high school dropout Jean-Michel Basquiat announced his arrival on the downtown scene with the ubiquitous graffiti tag SAMO© (“same old sh_t”). Filmmaker Sara Driver was also there, hanging out with musicians and artists at the Mudd Club, crashing at friends’ apartments, lining up for gallery openings, and going to film school with the likes of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch (her future partner). Through interviews with those who knew the young Basquiat—including Jarmusch, Al Diaz, Fab 5 Freddy, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Kenny Scharf, Lee Quiñones, and others—plus footage and music of the time, and never-before-seen works and photographs by the artist, Driver has created a teeming portrait of his New York and a memory poem to a life cut short. It shows why Basquiat’s art—“raw, inventive, socially engaged—continues to speak to us” (New York Times).