Sky Arte airs documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat's teenage years

Sky Arte will broadcast the documentary 'Boom For Real – The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat' directed by Sara Driver on Thursday, December 22, the birthday of the revolutionary artist. The film focuses on Basquiat as an eighteen-year-old, before he became an icon of American graffiti, when he was homeless, created graffiti signed 'Samo' on subway cars and doors, carried a stereo playing his favorite music, wrote poetry, took LSD, and frequented the Mudd Club and Club 57, exclusive New York nightspots of the 1970s. The documentary captures the cultural and political ferment of the era—racial tensions, Andy Warhol's Factory, excess, creative anarchy in a violent and economically depressed New York. It explores his genius through music, poems, illustrations, hip hop, and street art, long before his death from heroin at age 27.