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Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to fame in the early ‘80s as a painter with bright strong flashes of color, streaks of black, jagged, oddly angled heads and crossed-out words, then died of a heroin overdose at age 27. His story has been told many times before—in Glenn O’Brien’s loosely crafted 1981 fiction film Downtown 81 (aka New York Beat) about a Village artist struggling to pay the bills; in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright’s alternately shambling and alert performance in the lead; and in at least seven books, including Phoebe Hoban’s journalistic 1998 biography Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. Now he is the subject of friend Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, which announces its intentions to uphold its subject’s legacy from the title onward.Read More »