Warhol. Basquiat. Electric, eccentric, polar opposites… together, for the first time in the most unlikely partnership the art world has ever seen. Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope star in the thrilling American premiere of the London sensation, The Collaboration. In the summer of 1984, longtime international superstar Andy Warhol and the art scene’s newest wunderkind, Jean-Michel Basquiat, agree to work together on what may be the most talked about exhibition in the history of modern art. But can these two creative giants co-exist, or even thrive?
Though apparently more knowledgeable about Warhol—aren’t we all?—McCarten attempts to make the Basquiat character a vessel for his bogus rants against commercialism and the soullessness of modern art, having the younger artist press against his elder’s silkscreens and logo-ridden works. Each character is as thin as a Campbell’s soup label, but the insistence to ask these rote questions, then cop out of answering any when they turn to why the street artist himself is so comfortable with his funds is frustrating. And poor Pope, a multitalented actor here strangled under insufferable characterization, heightened by Kwame Kwei-Armah’s juvenile direction. Despite Pope’s impressive voicework, the writer and director’s Basquiat is conceived in the tired Cool Young Artist mold, ashing his joint in Warhol’s coffee cup before going Artist As Tweaker On The Spectrum when freaking out to jazz records, and staring, slack-jawed, into space—his otherworldly artistic visions ostensibly taking him out of this realm.
Directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah and inspired by the real life 1984 painting collaboration of the aging (at least in terms of artistic relevance) Warhol and the soaring Basquiat – a project presented so much more convincingly and movingly in the 1996 film Basquiat, starring Jeffrey Wright and, in the definitive performance of Warhol, David Bowie, who haunts this play like a shadow – The Collaboration is an oddly lifeless endeavor, a failure in capturing even a moment of simple artistic inspiration much less the ignition of of collaborative genius.
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