Radiant
"I finally said fuck it, ima write it myself," rapper says
Nobody wrote a Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic for Kid Cudi, so, as he announced on Wednesday, he got sick of waiting and wrote his own. The film, Jean, will begin filming in 2027, according to the rapper’s Instagram.
“For years people have asked me about playing Jean-Michel Basquiat in a film,” he wrote. “But no project actually came to be. This year, I finally said fuck it, ima write it myself.”
Cudi posted a photo of himself as the late artist, whose fusion of graffiti and African-inspired work won over the downtown New York art world in the Eighties, wearing a baggy suit, smoking a cigarette, and looking pensive, his hair in dreads tied above his head. Regarding the wig he’s wearing, he wrote, “This isn’t the final just a rough; trust me we gon get it perfect.”
The rapper, 42, also posted about the research he put into writing the screenplay. He read books and interviewed people who knew Basquiat, who died at age 27 in 1988. “This film will be a love letter to Jean, the Eighties and NY city,” he wrote. “Jean has inspired me all throughout my career, and it will be the biggest honor to tell his story in a way we haven’t seen before. I know a lot of y’all gon be like FINALLY hahaha I love it. This one’s for all those dreamers out there.” (Reps for the Basquiat Estate did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.)
Basquiat was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, where he grew up along with spending a few years in Puerto Rico. He made a name for himself on the New York streets in the late Seventies using the tag SAMO and joined a friend group that included likeminded artists Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. He also played in a noise-rock group called Gray with Vincent Gallo.
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A series of high-profile gallery showings in the early Eighties established him in the fine-art world and he found himself on the fringes of mainstream pop culture, appearing in a Blondie music video and dating Madonna before she was famous. His art often featured jazz luminaries, boxers, and other figures along with graffiti-like words. A New York Times Magazine cover image and Basquiat’s friendship with Andy Warhol catapulted him into the international consciousness a few years before he died of a heroin overdose.
In 1996, Jeffrey Wright portrayed Basquiat in artist Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat biopic. Several documentaries have followed.