As he walks, he muses in voiceover and this is where Jean-Michel Basquiat becomes more fiction than fact. In the years between the shooting of Downtown 81 and the movie’s post-production supervised two decades later by Maripol, the dialogue elements were lost. Because Basquiat had passed away, the words that O’Brien had written specifically for him were rerecorded by the slam poet Saul Williams. Basquiat arrives downtown to tag a wall or two with the cryptic phrases that soon made their way into his paintings. He encounters a beautiful young model driving a convertible and accepts a ride. Throughout the movie, he will half-heartedly try to connect with her, until he thinks the better of it, preferring to walk the mean streets of Manhattan by himself.

And make no mistake, the streets were mean. By the mid-1970s, New York was in a financial meltdown. Of course, the Upper East Side neighborhood where Basquiat begins his long walk home was clean and as safe as any neighborhood can be in a city with a large gap between rich and poor. The difference between New York in 1980 and New York today is that the neighborhoods of the city populated by people who were poor and middle class have almost disappeared as Manhattan has been gentrified, bought up by real estate developers who’ve built expensive condos and rental buildings, often luring wealthy customers with claims that these still are artist—ie. cool—neighborhoods, which is a crock, because no young artists, musicians, filmmakers, coders, hackers, dancers, or skaters can afford to live in them. What makes Downtown from circa 1964 to 1984 so fascinating—indeed, mythic—to an emerging creative generation and its audience is that cheap rents allowed people to live like outlaws and to build their own outlaw communities in which they could literally make their mark.

The first time I saw the tag SAMO© was on the door of a garage opposite the co-op on Wooster Street in Soho where I’ve lived since 1972. That garage was demolished and replaced by a condo building in which the penthouse sold for $35 million. Basquiat lived, briefly and usually rent-free, in various Soho spaces, and in the late ’70s, he sold postcard-sized paintings and drawings on the street for whatever he could get. I thought they were extraordinary, and I would buy one whenever I ran into him. His line, which combined the childlike and the extremely sophisticated, was like nothing I’d ever seen. The only Basquiats I could afford were stolen during the first and only open door party I threw.