Basquiat · reception & legacy

1996 · Julian Schnabel

How Basquiat has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Dismissed by many in 1996 as Julian Schnabel's vanity project — a famous painter casting a Schnabel stand-in (Gary Oldman) in his own directing debut — it's since been reappraised as the definitive downtown-NYC art-world movie, with Jeffrey Wright's breakout turn and Schnabel's later acclaim (Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) doing the rehabilitating.

What's debated

The evergreen fight: is this really Basquiat's story, or a rich white art star telling his own — plus the sub-debate over whether Bowie's Warhol is the best screen Warhol ever or an impression that swallows the movie.

Its footprint

David Bowie playing Andy Warhol is the film's afterlife — the images circulate endlessly, and it's a fixture of every 'musicians acting' and 'best screen Warhols' list, alongside Crispin Glover's and Guy Pearce's takes.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd favourite of the art-kid cinephile crowd — the gateway film for the 80s downtown scene and the start of the Jeffrey Wright appreciation society.

★ Did you know? The Basquiat estate refused to license the real paintings, so Schnabel and his studio painted the Basquiats seen on screen themselves — while Bowie, for his part, wore Warhol's actual wig and glasses, borrowed from the Warhol museum's collection.