Released less than a decade after the untimely death of its subject, painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s debut movie, Basquiat (1996), suffers from the primary problem plaguing most biopics: it has a stronger sense of the narrative surrounding its person of interest, in this case the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, than it does their point of view. (Although, even then, the film’s storytelling persistently leaves something to be desired, its elliptical style leaving out, to name a couple of the more tabloid-baiting moments of his life, Basquiat’s much-written about love affair with Madonna and the details of his fallout with his early mentor, Andy Warhol, who’s played in the film by a self-consciously sing-songy David Bowie.) 

Schnabel, who for a time had the same art dealer as his subject, knew Basquiat in life; their complementarily outré paintings appeared alongside each other in exhibitions, too. Some of the movie’s flourishes have a thrilling meeting-of-the-minds quality: Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright) looking up at the bright sky and seeing it as a glittering ocean complete with surfers riding its waves; him prank-calling a suicide hotline only to have Schnabel depict the moment not in full but by superimposing the audio of the conversation onto a series of short clips of Wright making different spaced-out expressions. 

But when in interviews Schnabel says something along these lines — “The film is my portrait of Jean-Michel. It’s not a standard biopic. I took some liberties” — I’m not pulled back to those specific-to-Schnabel artistic touches because it, to my eye, comes across more like deflection for the film’s main shortcoming: that it’s a conventional rise-and-fall biopic that doesn’t have very much to say about Basquiat outside of his being brilliant, eccentric, and too young to have been able to healthily adjust to a much-scrutinized life. Hagiographic Basquiat leaves you wanting for the most rudimentary details: what his upbringing was like; how he conceived of his art, which is not very engaged with beyond a microaggressive white interviewer (Christopher Walken) coaxing the artist to say that his works channel the crudeness he sees in most people.

Basquiat gives the impression that Schnabel knew Basquiat well but not that well. None of what doesn’t work about the movie can be blamed on Wright, though. He gives an alluringly evasive, light-limbed performance so good that he can only deepen the film’s disappointments. He makes you want to know Basquiat better than the movie allows you to. The film is best at picking at how alienating it must be to suddenly be famous, unsure of who genuinely appreciates your work and who likes it more for the cultural cachet with which it’s associated. That at least gives everything an acidic underlay missing from most biopics; the viewer might feel a little complicit in the destructive, more-more-more atmosphere its subject struggled to grapple with. Complaints that Basquiat doesn’t really let us meaningfully understand its subject feels like a fraught extension of that. Oeuvre and agreed-to interviews aside, how much do we have a right to know?