Basquiat tells the story of a young, talented, ambitious black artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and his meteoric rise in the New York art world. The film is full of famous actors, many with a vested interest in playing real-life characters from the 1980s New York art scene. This video looks at the overlap of reality and fiction in Basquiat, which was directed by fellow 80s art star Julian Schnabel, both in the way that real people are represented and how Basquiat’s real story measures against the movie’s telling of it.
For more musings on truth and the movies, don’t miss our video series “I’ll Believe It When I See It”: Movies in the Tech Age, The Unreliable Narrator, Truth vs. Facts, and Bunnies, Brad Pitt, and Imaginary Friends, and our article on Werner Herzog’s Ecstatic Truthiness!
