Frida (2002), At Eternity’s Gate (2018), and Basquiat (1996) offer three distinct approaches to portraying artists on screen, each grappling with the tension between biographical fidelity and emotional truth. While Frida encapsulates its subject’s vibrant chaos within a more traditional frame, At Eternity’s Gate invites us into a fractured inner world where form mirrors psyche. Basquiat, drifting through smoky lofts and sharp silences, captures the dissonance of being both seen and commodified. What unites them is the struggle to render interiority visible. Some succeed more than others, but each points to the difficulty of containing an artist’s soul within a cinematic frame.

Frida (2002)

In Frida, some stylized moments flirt with deviation from standard biopic convention, but the film stays dutifully on course, cautiously nestling these sequences within a rather dry and selective chronology of Kahlo’s life. As someone who also turned to creative expression during a bedridden chapter, I longed for more of the vividity, flamboyance, and undercurrent of pain that defined her and her art. The image of her bloodied body covered in gold dust after the tram crash could have served as a potent metaphor for pain transmuted into art, setting the stage for a more expressionistic and emotionally immersive portrait. Instead, the film retreats into safer narrative territory, favoring exposition over interiority.

The film is structured around the men who loved or betrayed her. While not overtly filtered through the male gaze, this narrative framing reduces her complexity to a series of relationships, sidelining the inner tumult and radical self-possession that animated her art. Similarly, her queerness is confined to brief, performative scenes that lack depth or follow-through. Hayek, to her credit, brings reverence and emotional intensity to the role, but her performance feels hemmed in, as if the script won’t allow her to fully erupt.

Taymor’s direction, though structurally competent, ultimately reins in more than it unleashes. Frida is distilled of Kahlo’s spirit, clunky in its dialogue, and formulaic in its emotional beats, offering a likeness far more constrained than the woman herself.

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”

At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

At Eternity’s Gate is an impressionistic, meandering film that captures the essence of the enigmatic and tormented Van Gogh. He was an open wound, deeply misunderstood, seeking oneness and consolation in deliberate brush strokes. The feverish camerawork, severe cuts, and repetitive audio mirror Van Gogh’s inner experience, and although these stylistic decisions feel a bit gimmicky at times, the audience’s disorientation admittedly mimics the painter’s alienation from the world.

“I’d like to share my vision with people who can’t see what I see the way I see. […] I can make people feel what it’s like to be alive.”

Basquiat (1996)

In Basquiat, director Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, crafts a moody, elliptical portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat that is as much about the art world’s alienation as it is about the artist himself. The film resists a conventional rise-and-fall biopic structure, opting instead for a drifting, dreamlike rhythm that mirrors Basquiat’s own quiet detachment. 

The film is strongest when it leans into abstraction, when Basquiat’s inner world is rendered through surreal vignettes, like the crown motifs that haunt his consciousness or the image of him surfing through the city on waves of fame and loneliness. Even with these flourishes, Basquiat remains curiously opaque. We witness his brilliance and unraveling, but rarely feel invited into his emotional core.

Wright gives a subtle, haunted performance, often saying more with silence than with words. His restraint contrasts sharply with the eccentric, overdrawn art scene characters that surround him: Willem Dafoe, Dennis Hopper, and David Bowie’s eerie, affected Warhol among them. This imbalance sometimes reduces Basquiat to a passive figure in his own story, a vessel for other people’s projections and commodification. 

The film’s hazy visual style, jazzy pacing, and sense of elegy offer a fitting tribute to an artist who burned bright and left behind more questions than answers. Like his paintings, Basquiat feels urgent and unfinished, an echo of a life interrupted.

“He says he’s jealous of the moon, because you look at it. He’s jealous of the sun, because it warms you. He says, ‘I feel you, even when I’m not feeling you. I talk to you when I’m not talking to you. I love you, even when I’m not loving you.’”