Perhaps the most telling scene in Julian Schnabel's 1996 film Basquiat comes about three-quarters into the picture, when the famous retro graffiti artist suffers through an interview. After having previously watched him create some of these pieces, he is asked by the reporter to decipher them. He starts to talk about them, and we realize how very little we understand about the man and about his muse.
I suppose in a way this is the point, and in depicting Basquiat's meteoric rise to fame, it quickly becomes apparent that much of the acclaim that plagued him was thrust upon him precisely because of his lack of worldly knowledge of art or of anything else outside of New York City. One of the characters even goes so far as to boast that his voice is the voice of the gutter.
The cast list reads like a who's who of indie filmmaking. Willem Dafoe has a cameo as an electrician, Christopher Walken plays a magazine reporter interviewing Basquiat, Parker Posey plays art dealer Mary Boone, Paul Bartel portrays Henry Geldzahler... even Courtney Love makes an appearance as a pink-scarved streetwoman. David Bowie is magnetic as the mumbling, childlike Andy Warhol, a subdued Dennis Hopper plays Bruno Bischofberger, an inspired Gary Oldman is Albert Milo, and Michael Wincott tackles the moody writer René Ricard. Amidst all of these other supporting performers, two stand out. Benicio Del Toro's portrayal of good friend Benny Dalmau and the gorgeous Claire Forlani as Gina Cardinale both portray people who should have walked away from Basquiat a long time ago. They stick around, though, because that's what friends and lovers do.
Jeffrey Wright plays Basquiat himself, and he inhabits the world of the disjointed artist quite effectively. With one arm habitually elevated to slant his posture, Wright makes the famous painter's physicality interesting to watch. Unfortunately, despite the presence of various drugs in various scenes, we never get a real sense of the toll the substances ever took on his health. There is a scene where acne is mentioned and starts to set in, and another where he has fallen asleep and it scares a close friend, but other than that the drugs become more of an extension of Basquiat, rather than a corrupting discovery he could suddenly afford. In order to glorify the tragically short life of the artist, one must at least show the highs and lows of the drugs that would eventually take his life.
Basquiat obviously begs to be interpreted as a work of art itself. In the background, at different points, we hear two Tom Waits songs, two songs by the Pogues, and even one by David Bowie himself. What ends up happening, though, is you get the feeling the filmmakers had a lot of actors onboard to play various parts, then the writers (Lech Majewski and John F. Bowe) pieced together as many scenes as was required without displaying some of the highlights from his brief career. So we aren't experiencing a work of art, so much as a lot of sketches in a stranger's notebook.
