Basquiat

Basquiat (1996) is a biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by painter Julian Schnabel and starring Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel Basquiat. At nineteen, Basquiat was tagging Lower Manhattan walls under the name SAMO. By twenty-one he was selling canvases to collectors who had never walked the blocks where he slept rough.

Schnabel knew this world firsthand, which shows. The film doesn't construct a redemptive arc — it tracks how money, heroin and sudden fame hit a young man who had no frame for any of it. David Bowie plays Andy Warhol with an eerie stillness. Benicio del Toro, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe fill out a cast that feels more like a document than a production. Basquiat the character never quite lands — and the film is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

For anyone interested in how the art market works, or how celebrity consumes people before they understand what's happening, this holds up sharper than most portraits of the era. Stream Basquiat (1996) online on iFILM.