“Waves” star Kelvin Harrison Jr. will bring iconic New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat back to the silver screen with his starring role in the upcoming biopic “Samo Lives.”
Variety shared the news of Harrison’s casting in an Instagram post, to which Harrison replied “Same ol’ sh*t”—a reference to Basquiat and fellow artist Al Diaz’s graffiti tag SAMO.
Harrison can be seen in the recently released musical “Cyrano,” alongside costars Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett.
The BAFTA Rising Star Award nominee is joining forces once again with director Julius Onah for the “Samo Lives,” which will begin filming this fall. The pair previously worked together on the 2019 thriller “Luce.”
“Samo Lives” is not the first film to tackle the complex life of the Haitian-Puerto Rican creative. However, the film is the first to tell Basquiat’s story through the lens of a Black filmmaker. Onah was, in part, introduced to the acclaimed artist through the Julian Schnabel-directed 1996 film “Basquiat.”
But “Samo Lives” aims to paint a fuller picture of the boundary-breaking icon.
“The older I got and the more I learned about Jean-Michel, the more I began to feel his story hadn’t fully been told in cinema,” wrote Onah in a director’s statement on the film’s website. “Never have we seen the full spectrum of Basquiat’s incredible life as a Black artist and a child of the immigrant African diaspora. And the richness and nuance of his journey is a story worthy of celebration.”
Though Basquiat would flourish into a quintessential artist of 1980’s Neo-expressionism, his early artistic life was set to the backdrop of gritty late 1970’s New York. Young Basquiat plastered the joyously rebellious and now-iconic SAMO tag all over Manhattan, catching the attention of the art world.
By 22, Basquiat’s inclusion in the long-running art survey Whitney Biennial cemented him as an artist of the zeitgeist.
Though his untimely death at the age of 27 cast a dark cloud on the art community and beyond, his work still resonates today. As evident by the frequent multi-million-dollar sales of his artwork at auctions, Basquiat’s legacy is worthy of committing to film in all its fullness.
