Downtown 81 (2000)

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Jean-Michel Basquiat plays a semi-homeless NYC artist/musician on the Lower East Side in 1981. New Wave hijinx ensue.



Art-house flick shot in 1981 but finished 19 years later shows a disappeared scene w/ lots of real-life musicians and hangouts including Blondie, Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Fab Five Freddy, James White & the Blacks and several others who weren't as successful.



[YOUTUBE]X6GoKk-iMOs[/YOUTUBE]

[Vic Sage]

there was also a biopic with Jeffrey Right from the 1990s.

[LWFS]

Vic Sage wrote: there was also a biopic with Jeffrey Right from the 1990s.

With Bowie as Warhol!



Directed by painter/director Julien Schnabel, who later made Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and that movie about Van Gogh with Willem Defoe from last year. They're all beautiful movies-- visually and otherwise-- about creativity/striving in the face of death/adversity (among many other things). (Diving Bell-- about a French journalist who suddenly finds himself stricken with "locked-in syndrome," is a personal favorite among them.)



Downtown 81 is okay, IIRC, but even when i saw it (back around/right after initial release) it was mostly of value as a visual nostalgia trip.

[Edgy MD]

Interesting. Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy both appear with Blondie in their "Rapture" video, shot around the same time.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Rapture is in the soundtrack.



LWFS got it, it's primarily a visual--and aural--snapshot of the moment, but the "story" such as it is, has a certain charm in the telling too as a mix of gritty realism with a literal fairy tale ending.

[LWFS]

I mean, it's not without charms. But I ain't, y'know, fighting a city full of costumed gangs to see it, y'know?

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Not mentioned in the movie is that the hospitalization it begins with was for injuries sustained fighting for the Grammercy Riffs