In 1981, Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright) was a 19-year-old graffiti artist living on the streets. Eight years later, he was a world-renowned painter -- and dead of a heroin overdose. Director Julian Schnabel's biopic won an Independent Spirit Award for its depiction of Basquiat's tumultuous but meteoric rise in New York's art world, his anguish over his family and his hatred of a society that both courted and exploited him.