In 1983, an apparently emotionally disabled interviewer asked Jean-Michel Basquiat whether there was anger in his paintings. The artist responded that his work was about 80 percent anger. Basquiat's exuberant, text-heavy paintings also convey joy, the coolheaded thought that went into their making, and a sort of stealthy erudition. But the artist, who died in 1988, had plenty of reasons to be angry. Just before the rise of political correctness, the highly educated, guilt-ridden white art world used Basquiat for catharsis—consuming and celebrating his expressions as fetish products. People liked his anger. Given the context, he found himself in the horrifying position of gaining from his own objectification. And not much of the context has changed.

The new documentary on Basquiat's life—Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child—was made by a friend of his named Tamra Davis. It centers on an interview with the artist in which Davis asks not particularly interesting questions, leaving the impression of a treasure chest pawed at by a dog. Still, it's not as bad as the 1996 Hollywood version made by Julian Schnabel, and you should see it for several reasons: for its many sequences of the paintings; in order to make an unprecedented amount of eye contact with the artist (this is the only feature-length documentary on Basquiat, who died of a heroin overdose at 27); and for what it unintentionally reveals about art, celebrity, and race in contemporary America.

Problematically, the movie reinscribes the old causes of Basquiat's anger in some ways, rather than calling them out. For instance, it's maddening to watch as art-world power broker Jeffrey Deitch (once Basquiat's dealer, now, newly, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) paints a pitiful picture of coming across Basquiat on New Year's Eve of the year before he died. Basquiat was sitting at a bar alone, with nobody by his side. "Here was the most famous artist of his generation," Deitch intones, "and he was alone!" Deitch's incredulity is absurd—as if he doesn't see that Basquiat's fame is precisely what made him alone. (Deitch is still in the business of minting art stars, with sometimes dubious results. Shades of Basquiat reverberated out from the recent Deitch-facilitated train wreck of a performance on the soap opera General Hospital by Kalup Linzy, a bulky black man who crossdresses as various characters in his own parodic video series All My Churen. Linzy wore an appropriately lost look on TV.)

The obvious point that celebrity is isolating but celebrity and tokenism together can be fatal seems lost on Schnabel, the 1980s painter (now famous for his movies, especially The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) who serves as one of the documentary's talking heads. Schnabel and Basquiat are sometimes described as friends; they were also certainly rivals. There's unpleasantness in the fact that Schnabel created the Hollywood Basquiat biopic, which smooths over anything truly troubling and leaves the basic impression of the same old dead genius. There's further Schnabellian unpleasantness in this new film, when he implies that the 1980s art world was simply a shit storm he weathered better than Basquiat, as if he were a returned veteran from the same front where Basquiat fell. Schnabel sounds like an elder, but his art world—that of a white guy admitted to the Whitney Museum of American Art's prestigious independent study program about five minutes after getting his art degree—was not Basquiat's art world. There's one section of the film overtly devoted to a discussion of race, but then the subject goes unacknowledged (and the omission goes unexplored).

That's the fault of the filmmaker, who doesn't seem to have an enormous amount to offer in the way of analysis of Basquiat's life and work. She does do the work of collecting storms of images of his paintings and of his early graffiti writings as SAMO© (Same Old Shit), which are a pleasure and a privilege to see all at one go. She also does a good job depicting Basquiat's intellectually rich, emotionally difficult early family life and the painful rejection he felt later by his father, an accountant from Haiti who was busy trying to make his own way in a world into which he was continuously immigrating. The New York Times gave the documentary a lukewarm review, ending with this, which bears repeating: "It should help push the prices of his work higher." recommended