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

A portrait not only of an alluring, homeless teenager who became a giant of 20th-century art, but also of the entire New York graffiti scene, hip-hop and breakdance. An era when William Borroughs' Naked Lunch and heroin were-in exciting minds-equal parts of the culture. The atmosphere of loitering, of killing time together in the most beautiful of ways is the simultaneous birth of punk and performance art. He hid under the pseudonym SAMO, painted on clothing and played in a band before it became fashionable: Jean-Michel Basquiat had extraordinary intuition that always put him in the spotlight, as rare footage from the Lower East Side proves. He created visual poetry on ruins, and subway cars were like syllables. The film reconstructs the time when he developed from a sweet adolescent into a self-conscious artist. The relationships among the women under his spell, defeated rivals and people he worked with include Andy Warhol, whose golden vampiric shadow babbles somewhere on the horizon.