Marya E. Gates Cool People Have Feelings, Too. (Substack) Feb 12, 2024

Not only explores this time in the artist’s life, but also puts the arts scene in New York City1 at the time into illuminating context.

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Jason Adams The Film Experience Jul 2, 2021

Even more than just feeling truthful about the man himself it paints a vital portrait of the time and place that he worked in and helped catapult to eternal coolness

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Steven Prokopy Third Coast Review Jun 17, 2020

The time and place is so miraculously captured that it feels like you're looking at life on another planet -- one where while punk-rock kids moved in the same circles as hip-hop performers, and the resulting art is a ragged and fully representational.

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Dan Scully Cinema76 Apr 15, 2020

Boom for Real is a perfectly entertaining film, which accurately captures one of the most deliciously avant-garde settings in American history, but with every moment of "oh, cool" comes a missed opportunity to dig deeper.

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Craig Hubert Hyperallergic Feb 14, 2020

Overexposure has at once gone deeper and flattened out the story. What else is there for people to say?

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Jennie Kermode Eye for Film Dec 3, 2018 3.5/5

A life like this is never tidy and neither is Driver's documentary. Moving at speed, it reflects the impatience of the teenager, constantly switching from one thing to another

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Felicia Feaster Burnaway.org Nov 3, 2018

This potent love letter to Basquiat is also a Proustian remembrance of things past and a pre-gentrification New York City, where anything seemed possible.

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Andrew Karpan Nonfics (Substack) Aug 31, 2018

The documentary's under-90-minute brevity makes these events feel like they are happening even faster than they did, creating a simulacra of witnessing Basquiat's talent.

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Tara Brady Irish Times Jul 23, 2018 4/5

Down, delightfully dirty and almost impossible to reconcile with last year's record-breaking $110 million sale of Basquiat's untitled skull painting, Boom for Real is for real all right.

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Craig Mathieson The Sunday Age Jul 14, 2018 4/5

Driver never uses interview footage, relying on the testimony of those present while capturing the club culture and underground galleries that were his home. It's a valuable insider's view: steeped in history, but shorn of nostalgia.

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Lee Jutton Film Inquiry Jul 12, 2018

Boom for Real benefits from Driver's intimate familiarity with its subject: both Basquiat himself and the downtown New York in which he thrived.

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Francesca Angelini Sunday Times (UK) Jun 26, 2018 3/5

To [Sara Driver's] credit, however, she doesn't shy away from the darker side of his story, and the radical downtown art scene that made Basquiat comes through blazing.

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Wendy Ide Observer (UK) Jun 25, 2018 4/5

The central character in the film remains curiously enigmatic, like a drawing that hasn't been completely coloured in.

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Ray Pride Newcity Jun 22, 2018 7/10

Sara Driver's delicious, detailed but restlessly suggestive [documentary] reaches back three decades to the first days of young Basquiat on the streets of New York City and its art scene. It's a punchy lozenge.

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Kevin Maher The Times (UK) Jun 22, 2018 2/5

This could be deliberate, making the point that Basquiat was essentially unknowable, but it makes for a film that's considerably less engaging than its subject.

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Andy Lea Daily Express (UK) Jun 22, 2018 4/5

This is an engrossing study of a young artist and a vibrant period in American cultural history.

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Alistair Harkness Scotsman Jun 22, 2018 3/5

A kind of abstract portrait of an elusive young artist who harnessed all this disparate creative energy and transformed it into something exciting and new.

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Andrea Gronvall Chicago Reader Jun 21, 2018

Because Basquiat started as a graffiti artist, many of his earliest works were destroyed, so the rare photos here, provided by his friend Alexis Adler, are illuminating.

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Loren King Newport This Week (RI) Jun 21, 2018

Driver's film, fortunately, not only preserves it but reminds us of its still-vibrant connection to the present.

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Peter Bradshaw Guardian Jun 21, 2018 3/5

The film doesn't quite get under Basquiat's skin, but does a thorough job of reconstructing that forgotten city of late-70s New York in which Basquiat came of age.

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