Before Tamra Davis was directing comedy classics like CB4 and Half Baked, she was hanging around people from the storied downtown New York art scene and taking footage of her friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. After he died, she shelved the film for 20 years and never considered doing anything with it until 2006, when she developed a short for a Basquiat retrospective. Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child is an expanded, feature-length version of that short, combining her extensive archives with interviews with the artist and his friends, including Fab Five Freddy, Julian Schnabel and his girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, who talks about getting into a fistfight with Madonna. Watch a brief clip above, then go watch the incredible full-length trailer over at Nowness, which presented Radiant Child at the Tribeca Film Festival last night.
