DOWNTOWN 81 featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat coming in new print

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Starts October 25
Metrograph Theater NYC
November 1
Roxie Theater San Francisco

[From a press release]

In 1981, Interview Magazine writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, then a 21-year-old graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of Lower Manhattan to make a movie about the bombed out bohemia that they knew, with a script by O’Brien, Bertoglio directing, and Basquiat, a naturally compelling presence, starring. Left incomplete due to money problems and assembled for release in 2000, Downtown 81, which follows Basquiat trying to move a painting while hustling for a place to sleep, became a window on the artistic NYC milieu of that key moment. Featuring early Jim Jarmusch star John Lurie, graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy, and singer Debbie Harry, with musical performances by DNA, James White and the Blacks, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts — and the sublime grunge of early Eighties Manhattan, New York.

A film by Edo Bertoglio. Cast: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Debbie Harry, Fab 5 Freddie, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Tuxedomoon, The Plastics, Debi Mazar, Cookie Mueller, Lee Quinones. USA. 2000. 85min. A Metrograph Pictures release.