Basquiat allows him to retell some of the C.V.J story in colour, with movement, and in pictorial terms impossible to achieve in print. The book provides a structural plan for the film which is then fleshed out with the detail which we see on the screen. We perceive an accumulation of vignettes which explain why the film has a formal physicality, the presence of an object which a simple narrative would not have. The film, like Schnabel called painting, is a bouquet of mistakes. His second film, W