Tamra Davis pays homage to her friend in this documentary but also delves into him as an iconoclast. His dense, bebop-influenced neoexpressionist work emerged while minimalist, conceptual art was the fad; as a successful black artist, he was constantly confronted by racism and misconceptions.

Tamra Davis’s essential documentary on a visionary, Jean-Michel Basquiat, looks beyond his enigmatic aura. A vibrant, tantalizing study of an artist who, in the director’s own words, “became famous for his art, and then became famous for being famous, and then became famous for being infamous.”