“Jean-Michel” is the Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary we’ve been waiting for — the fantastic one he deserves. Over the years, there have been a sprinkling of films built around Basquiat, like the boho vérité snapshot “Downtown 81” (2000) or “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat” (2018), which captured the period in the late ’70s after he’d broken with his family, when he was a scene-maker cultivating the seeds of his art and fame. Both those films are heady time capsules, and so, in a different way, is Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat” (1996), a biopic — starring the hypnotic Jeffrey Wright — that was way ahead of the curve in recognizing the poetic sway of Basquiat’s art and image.
But “Jean-Michel,” directed by Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman (it just premiered at the Tribeca Festival and was bought by Netflix), is the first movie to penetrate the Basquiat mystique and give you a full-scale portrait of who he was: New York child of privilege, driven prodigy, bohemian scavenger, downtown rock star, thrill-seeking junkie, media celebrity, meditative soul, spiky and timeless art genius. It’s the first Basquiat film to be made in cooperation with his family, who provided the archive — home movies, photographs, sketches, notebooks — that fills in Basquiat’s life as never before.
