Review of Downtown 81

This film was short and very expressionistic. It has a lot of voice over and stars the famous, now deceased, Jean Michel Basquiat. I found out about the film by watching Blank City on fandor.com. The film was a documentary about the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression film movements that grew out of New York's Lower East Side. It really exposed me to filmmakers I has never heard of. Like Amos Poe. I had heard of Jim Jarmusch and seen a few of his films. But it was really my roommate from my screenwriting degree which reignited my interest in Jarmusch and the Lower East Side film scene. He recommended I watch Coffee and Cigarettes. I still haven't watched the whole thing.

The film follows Basquiat a struggling New York painter who straddles between a life of struggle and one of almost famous status. He sells a painting. He knows all kinds of people around the neighborhood. He is evicted from his apartment. He walks around the city. He goes to music clubs. Finally he goes down a dark alley, and magically meets Debbie Harrie who turns from a homeless person into a princess and leaves him with a suitcase of money. He is saved from homelessness.

Until the fairy princess, the film is utterly real. The scenes of the Lower East Side show the bombed out apartment buildings and how the neighborhood is overrun with drug dealers and thugs. But it's also a place where artists of all kinds live cheaply. Perhaps the best line from the film is Basquiat's line about the Lower East Side. He says it looks like "we dropped the bomb on ourselves." There is graffitti everywhere. Garbage everywhere. I guess it's at the point between the 60's urban renewal and the onset of gentrification. White flight and a lack of reinvestment in places like the Lower East Side show the lowly state the city of  New York was in. I think almost everyone remembers Gerry Ford's "drop dead" to the city when the city was bankrupt.

But this film isn't so much a sociological essay as intense experience of an artist trying to survive and thrive in the city mired in crisis. A very good film.