Scott Mescudi, the rapper known as Kid Cudi, announced on Instagram that he is working on a biopic about the oft-mythologized New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film, titled JEAN, will be written and directed by Cudi, who will also star as the titular artist. Cudi shared an image of the first page of a draft of his script, dated August 25, 2026, and said that filming is set to begin in 2027.
In his post, Cudi writes that people have been encouraging him to play Basquiat for years but that “no project actually came to be” so he decided to write it himself. He shared a mock-up of a poster for the film featuring a black and white photograph of himself as Basquiat, stylishly dressed in a suit and tie and smoking a cigarette, with a wig mimicking Basquiat’s trademark free-form dreadlocks. “This isnt the final just a rough,” Cudi writes. “trust me we gon get it perfect.”
A slideshow of black and white photos of Cudi lounging in what looks like an airy studio space and walking past a wall of graffiti shows him as a rather convincing Basquiat doppelgänger.
Cudi says that the film “will be a love letter to Jean, the 80s and NY city. Jean has inspired me all through out my career, and it will be the biggest honor to tell his story in a way we haven’t seen before.”
JEAN will have plenty of competition. Last fall, a different Basquiat biopic, Samo Lives (named after his graffiti tag, Samo©), began filming in the East Village. Kelvin Harrison Jr. is playing Basquiat and Julius Onah is directing, though updates about the project have been scarce and there is no release date. A film version of Anthony McCarten’s play The Collaboration, about the relationship between Basquiat and Andy Warhol, is also reportedly in the works, though no release date has been set for that either.
Cudi’s film will also presumably need to differentiate itself from the 1996 biopic Basquiat, written and directed by artist Julian Schnabel and starring Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat, and Downtown 81, a film starring Basquiat as a quasi-fictional artist named Jean, which was shot in 1981 but not released until 2000.
This will be Cudi’s third film as a director. He’s set to direct, write, and star in Doe, about an unhoused man in Hollywood, and is also starring in and directing Wrong Number, a horror film.
In an Instagram story, Cudi says that the time to finally make his Basquiat film is now. “I’m not getting any younger, I’m getting a bit older, and I felt like if I was going to do it, I better do it now. So I’m really f—ing excited, I think you’ll really f—ing love it. Super uplifting, super positive, inspiring. Get ready baby.”