The band Gray from Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Nick Taylor/Magnolia Pictures)

Sara Driver’s documentary opens with black-and-white footage of an abandoned, hollowed-out 1970s New York. A black balloon floats down a bombed-out street as the flat, Midwestern voice of President Gerald Ford scolds the city for going bankrupt and urges it to get its act together: “There’s an old saying: The harder you try, the luckier you get.”

This is the funky backdrop, where a teenage Jean-Michel Basquiat started out as a graffiti tagger before emerging as an art world star. Restlessly creative, he certainly worked hard, but how lucky he was is open to question; Basquiat died at 27 from a drug overdose. That death has helped made him a legend, with one individual canvas recently fetching more than $100 million.

Basquiat’s life has inspired other biopics and documentaries, but this one is not just a portrait of the artist. It’s a look at a moment when punk, graffiti, and hip-hop flourished and overlapped in a decaying city with room for oddballs and self-starters to run free.  In the chaotic, hopped-up New York of the Mudd Club and Club 57 (recently the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art), artists blurted out work of all kinds, ironic but refreshingly speedy and obnoxious. New York figures of the period—Fab 5 Freddy, Patricia Field, Jim Jarmusch, Kenny Scharf, and Lee Quinones—recall the thrills of the age and the excitement of watching Basquiat move beyond graffiti to combine the jagged shapes, hot colors, and seemingly random yet biting type that makes his work electric even 30 years later.

The striking, watchful young man at the heart of the film remains an enigma. Driver doesn’t cover his childhood or the all too short-lived celebrity that came later. It catches him in a narrow slice of time as he developed his style and waited for fame—something he knew was coming his way. People share stories of the artist as a wily seducer and a prime attention-getter, but genuine affection comes out most strongly when two women housemates laughingly describe how Basquiat crashed at their apartment and daubed their refrigerator with the words “grape jelly” in grape jelly. It’s perhaps telling that in the course of the movie Basquiat never once speaks.

Today the Internet has flattened out the sassy local events that once powered culture. New York is gleaming, sanitized, jealously protected for its big-money investors, but part of it yearns for a past where anything could happen (and did). Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat is a strong addition to a particular New York canon of a wilder, scarier city—the right place to nurture a talent dangerous in its own way.