Not only explores this time in the artist’s life, but also puts the arts scene in New York City1 at the time into illuminating context.

| Feb 12, 2024

Even more than just feeling truthful about the man himself it paints a vital portrait of the time and place that he worked in and helped catapult to eternal coolness

| Jul 2, 2021

The time and place is so miraculously captured that it feels like you're looking at life on another planet -- one where while punk-rock kids moved in the same circles as hip-hop performers, and the resulting art is a ragged and fully representational.

| Jun 17, 2020

Boom for Real is a perfectly entertaining film, which accurately captures one of the most deliciously avant-garde settings in American history, but with every moment of "oh, cool" comes a missed opportunity to dig deeper.

| Apr 15, 2020

Overexposure has at once gone deeper and flattened out the story. What else is there for people to say?

| Feb 14, 2020

A life like this is never tidy and neither is Driver's documentary. Moving at speed, it reflects the impatience of the teenager, constantly switching from one thing to another

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 3, 2018

This potent love letter to Basquiat is also a Proustian remembrance of things past and a pre-gentrification New York City, where anything seemed possible.

| Nov 3, 2018

The documentary's under-90-minute brevity makes these events feel like they are happening even faster than they did, creating a simulacra of witnessing Basquiat's talent.

| Aug 31, 2018

Down, delightfully dirty and almost impossible to reconcile with last year's record-breaking $110 million sale of Basquiat's untitled skull painting, Boom for Real is for real all right.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2018

Driver never uses interview footage, relying on the testimony of those present while capturing the club culture and underground galleries that were his home. It's a valuable insider's view: steeped in history, but shorn of nostalgia.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2018

Boom for Real benefits from Driver's intimate familiarity with its subject: both Basquiat himself and the downtown New York in which he thrived.

| Jul 12, 2018

To [Sara Driver's] credit, however, she doesn't shy away from the darker side of his story, and the radical downtown art scene that made Basquiat comes through blazing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 26, 2018

The central character in the film remains curiously enigmatic, like a drawing that hasn't been completely coloured in.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2018

Sara Driver's delicious, detailed but restlessly suggestive [documentary] reaches back three decades to the first days of young Basquiat on the streets of New York City and its art scene. It's a punchy lozenge.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 22, 2018

This could be deliberate, making the point that Basquiat was essentially unknowable, but it makes for a film that's considerably less engaging than its subject.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 22, 2018

This is an engrossing study of a young artist and a vibrant period in American cultural history.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 22, 2018

A kind of abstract portrait of an elusive young artist who harnessed all this disparate creative energy and transformed it into something exciting and new.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 22, 2018

Because Basquiat started as a graffiti artist, many of his earliest works were destroyed, so the rare photos here, provided by his friend Alexis Adler, are illuminating.

| Jun 21, 2018

Driver's film, fortunately, not only preserves it but reminds us of its still-vibrant connection to the present.

| Jun 21, 2018

The film doesn't quite get under Basquiat's skin, but does a thorough job of reconstructing that forgotten city of late-70s New York in which Basquiat came of age.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 21, 2018