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Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Documentary
A look at Jean-Michel Basquiat's life pre-fame, and how New York City, the times, the people and the movements around him formed the artist he became, BOOM FOR REAL weaves the story of Jean-Michel and the city with never before seen works, writings and photographs. Director Sara Driver worked closely and collaboratively with her friends and other artists who emerged from that scene: Nan Goldin, Jim Jarmusch, James Nares, Fab Five Freddy, Lee Quinones, Luc Sante and many others. As they participated in the film with their thoughts, period film footage, music, images, and anecdotes of their young friend, they helped visually tell the story of Jean-Michel's downtown NYC --pre Aids, President Reagan, the real estate and art boom, and before anyone was motivated by money and ambition. The definition of fame, success and power were very different than today -- to be a penniless but published poet was the height of success, until everything changed in the early 1980's. This is New York City's story before that change.
Rating
NR
Director
Sara Driver
Studio
Magnolia Pictures
- Excellent interviews and never-before-seen images will fascinate Basquiat's followers... [Full review in Spanish]Reply
- ... more noteworthy for the evocative recollections of its setting than for the insight it provides into Basquiat's tragic life and enduring legacy, although fans will find rewards.Reply
- What's admirable about the film is how Driver gives the cross-pollinating forces of music, media, fashion and art such concise, firsthand exploration.Reply
- As an archival record of the time, Boom for Real is fascinating but as an artist's biography, it's too narrow a window to be useful.Reply
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- Fans of Basquiat, Driver and her many, many interview subjects will eat it up. Everyone else will feel compelled on more than one occasion to check their phones.Reply
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- What's refreshing about Sara Driver's look-back documentary...is the frisky, contemplative, ground-level angle it takes on its hype-magnet of a subject.Reply
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- It is also an illuminating if narrowly cast portrait of the formative period in the twenty-seven-year life of an artist who absorbed and synthesized a visionary moment.Reply
- Basquiat's art - raw, inventive, socially engaged - continues to speak to us even as the artist himself cannot.Reply
- "Boom for Real" pinpoints the moment when the graffiti world pivoted, without knowing it, into the art world.Reply
- Boom makes Basquiat out to be an on-the-fringe, Zelig-like character, attempting to get his foot into a bustling arts scene where the inner-city people were beginning to mingle with the downtown folk.Reply
- Movingly remembers him -forever young--as unique figure who connected punk, hip hop, hardcore, DIY films, gallery, graffiti and street art, across genres, classes, and races.Reply
- Driver knows cool, and, to borrow from one of New York's current crop of aspirant hipsters, she was there, so the results are thorough, a fine primer for anyone who, like the film's Basquiat, is refining their nose for culture.Reply