The following review originally appeared in The Contributor newspaper in Nashville, TN…
Music Box Films’ new DVD release of Downtown 81
The film begins with painter Jean Michel Basquiat waking up in a hospital bed, unaware of how long he’s been there. “Time is different on the inside,” he says in voiceover. He doesn’t appear to be physically injured or ill and his intimations of having been in the place before imply that he’s experienced some kind of mental breakdown and that he’s in a psychiatric ward.
After being released from the hospital Basquiat returns home to his apartment only to discover that he’s been locked-out for lack of payment. Basquiat offers his landlord a painting that he refuses so Basquiat scrounges enough money to buy one marijuana joint before he sets off to find a buyer for the canvas.
Downtown 81 isn’t a documentary film, but the movie skirts the line between telling a post-modern fantasy and capturing real lives in the art and music scenes of early 1980’s Manhattan: Jean Michel Basquiat spent some of his early days as a graffiti artist homeless and living on the Mean Streets before becoming a world famous painter – he had nowhere to live during the making of the film and stayed in the movie’s production offices after wrapping each day. The artist was also known to hawk his own work piecemeal to passersby and once sold Andy Warhol some of his hand-painted postcards – the incident is revisited in Julian Schnabel’s biopic about the artist, Basquiat. James White and the Blacks, Blondie, Kid Creole and the Coconuts and the other performers in the movie were real bands in New York at the time, and Downtown ’81 stretches the thinnest layer of fiction over the proceedings. In this sense, the film nods to Andy Warhol’s movies in which actors often play a version of themselves within barely contrived plots. Basically, it was based on his real life,” said the film’s writer Glenn O’brien. “The film is an exaggerated version of real life.” This sly playing between documented reality and dramatized fiction is presaged by singer and actress Debbie Harry’s introduction to the film:
…Once upon a time this place was a wild frontier and every youngster who was fast on the draw showed up on these streets to try his hand. Anyway, the story you’re about to see isn’t true, but it isn’t false either. Any resemblance between the characters and events depicted here and reality is purely magical.
The better part of the film finds Basquiat wandering the streets, coming home from the hospital, trying to sell his painting, trying to meet girls, trying to get into clubs without paying a cover. At one point Basquiat’s character lists his interests including: anatomy, plutonium, Lazarus, Sherlock Holmes, hieroglyphics, Popeye.
It sounds like a cataloging of the enigmatic images and subjects that Basquiat mentioned in his poetic graffiti or in his canvases which often included frenzied doodles and odd statements ranging across an encyclopedic breadth of subjects. Within two years of making the film Basquiat was an international art star. By 1988 he was dead from a heroin overdose.
In addition to Basquiat another star of ’81 is its soundtrack created by many of the musicians who appear in the film. While the artist wanders through Gotham we see DJ’s scratching records while MC’s rap, capturing the earliest days of hip-hop in appearances by godfathers like Kool Kyle and Fab Five Freddy. The movie also documents the No Wave post-punk movement which replaced the anarchism of the Sex Pistols with art school aesthetics, creating an odd hybrid between the visual art and music undergrounds of the time.
The film was shot in 1980 and ‘81, but ran out of funding. It was finished in 2000 and premiered at Cannes that year. This new DVD release features the digitally remastered film, an audio commentary, interviews, a photo gallery, a 32 page booklet, and an episode of the cult 1980′s New York public-access television show Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.
Here’s the trailer…
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