Downtown 81

2000

Action / Comedy / Drama / Music / Musical

8
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 74% · 29 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 74% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 6.9/10 10 1743 1.7K

new york city gay interest artist art gay artist anarchic comedy

Plot summary

The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into.

Director

Edo Bertoglio Photo
Edo Bertoglio

Top cast

Debi Mazar Photo
Debi Mazar as Peppermint Lounge Dancer
Chris Stein Photo
Chris Stein as Self / Guitar, The Felons
Eszter Balint Photo
Eszter Balint as Fashion Show Model
Arto Lindsay Photo
Arto Lindsay as Self / Vocals and Guitar, DNA
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
654.07 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 11 min
Seeds 1
1.31 GB
1904*1072
English 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 11 min
Seeds 11

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by nrgigaba 8 / 10

An Experimental Film

Definitely not for everyone. The life in the life of a NYC artists, from the art scene to the music scene with a bit of drug influenced scenes. Love it or hate it, it's a peace of history.
Reviewed by ihash 10 / 10

A portrait of a lost time

Your assessment of this movie depends completely on what you are looking for. If you come to this film without any knowledge of who and what and why, it will be disappointing. But if you approach the film not as a movie in the regular sense but as an historical document of a moment in time, then it becomes an entirely different experience. In this sense it helps to understand what is being documented and who these people are. Some working knowledge of the late 70s NYC downtown scene, the Mudd Club, T.V. Party, the lower east side art boom, the post-punk music world, etc. gives you a much greater sense of appreciation. Understood historically and not just as another film, whether the movie works as a traditional film, whether the plot is interesting or the characters well developed (a tricky proposition seeing that the original dialogue was lost and had to be re-dubbed) doesn't matter. What you are seeing is the last truly avant garde art and music scene in the US before AIDS, money, MTV and the rest destroyed it. And it focuses on someone right at the center of the storm, Basquiat before his rise to international fame. (Another commentator questioned Basquiat's cultural credibility, but I'm not sure what culture he is talking about). Beyond that the musical performances are exceptional and rare and are worth the price of admission by themselves. This is a portrait of something lost and timeless. It is a fascinating historical document and should be appreciated as such.
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