The Radiant Child

The Radiant Child

Directed by Tamra Davis

[At Film Forum through Aug. 3]

Runtime: 90 min.

Tamra Davis’ documentary/memoir The Radiant Child, about painter/phenom Jean-Michel Basquiat, isn’t a definitive biography (Julian Schnabel’s 2001 romanticized biopic starring Jeffrey Wright has more detail), but it is a touching example of personal recall. Davis’ film touches on the camaraderie of the art crowd. She met Basquiat during her own fledging efforts as a bohemian art-maker during the 1980s.

This is unique, but it’s also a bit disappointing. Davis’ eulogistic doc never explores Basquiat’s racial insurgency—image and personality the art-world allows and exploits as "new." She sticks to timeline points about Basquiat’s departure from his immigrant family, sudden success at age 25 and his attraction to the art-world elite (Andy Warhol). But his descent into drug addiction, though mourned, is not scrutinized as an effect of his high-pressure class ambitions. Such missing details makes The Radiant Child fascinating yet unsatisfactory.

Davis first caught my attention when she created a music-video for The Smiths’ single “Sheila Take a Bow” in 1987. Unable to get cooperation from Morrissey and the group itself, Davis took a performance on Britain’s Top of the Pops TV show, then copied and re-edited it into a vibrant, surging document of the group at its peak. The Radiant Child similarly captures a "moment" as it reports on Basquiat bringing graffiti to the art world, helped by the endorsement of powerful friends and points out his enthusiasm for bebop rather than hip-hop. (“Salt Peanuts” is the film’s theme song: “Bebop not rap. Bebop is my favorite music,” Basquiat says on Downtown impresario Glenn O’Brien’s community-access cable TV program.)

Plainly, Basquiat related to the cultural advances of post-WWII black artists more than he represented the rebellion of his peers in the 1980s black underclass. This paradox awaits a more inquiring historian-biographer. Davis, instead, tries to fill in her gaps with testimonials from MTV shill Fab Five Freddy (Fred Braithwaite) and Nelson George—always a bad idea. Those hiphop-era climbers typically excuse their greed and neglectful friendships. Freddy says, “I didn’t know he was doing that [drugs] that hard.” He then opines: “At age 18, Jean-Michel knew how to position himself at the epicenter of art and music,” as if that were all that mattered. George says, “Money will kill you if you don’t know how to deal with it.”  Insensitive to Basquiat’s overlooked insecurity, these parvenus justify money and fame as a black man’s goal.