this week in film and television

TRAGEDIES OF YOUTH — NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI’S WAR TRILOGY

SEVEN WEEKS

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s beautifully told tale, Seven Weeks, is part of Japan Society online tribute

TRAGEDIES OF YOUTH — NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI’S WAR TRILOGY: SEVEN WEEKS (NO NO NANANANOKA) (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2014)
Japan Society virtual cinema
Available on demand through August 6, seven-day rental $10 per film, $24 for all three
japansociety.org

In December 2015, Japan Society presented the two-weekend, ten-film series “Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Retrospective,” which revealed that the Japanese auteur was so much more than just the director of the 1977 cult classic House. In commemoration of the recent death of the iconoclastic, eclectic writer-director, who passed away in April 2020 from lung cancer at the age of eighty-two, Japan Society is hosting a special monthlong online screening of his War Trilogy, consisting of 2012’s Casting Blossoms to the Sky, set in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, 2017’s Hanagatami, an adaptation of Kazuo Dan’s 1937 novella about a group of students falling in and out of love in prewar Japan, and the 2014 epic family drama Seven Weeks.

A tribute to Obayashi’s late friend and colleague Hyoji Suzuki, who started an independent film workshop in Ashibetsu in 1993 and died of pancreatic cancer four years later at the age of thirty-six, Seven Weeks was shot in and around that Hokkaido village over the course of five weeks. Ninety-two-year-old patriarch Mitsuo Suzuki (Toru Shinagawa), a local retired doctor who now runs the Starry Cultural Center gift shop (a nod to Suzuki’s Hoshi no Furusato Ashibetsu Eiga Gakko, or Starry Beautiful Home Ashibetsu Film School), is on his deathbed, and various relatives are arriving to say goodbye and participate in the nanana no ka Buddhist ritual, in which they will hold memorials once a week for seven weeks following his death. The mourners include Mitsuo’s sister, Eiko (Tokie Hidari), grandchildren Fuyuki (Takehiro Murata), Haruhiko (Yutaka Matsuhige), Akito (Shunsuke Kubozuka), and Kanna (Saki Terashima), and great-granddaughter Kasane (Hirona Yamazaki), in addition to his nurse, Nobuko Shimizu (Takako Tokiwa). During the seven weeks, family members relive the past, uncovering surprising secrets about the young Mitsuo (Shusaku Uchida), his harmonica-playing friend Ono (Takao Ito), and the woman they both admire, Ayano (Yumi Adachi), as Obayashi weaves together past and present through flashbacks, the appearance of dead characters, and painting and poetry (several of the characters share a love of the poems of Nakahara Chuya).

But the film, shot in lush, fairy-tale-like colors by cinematographer Hisaki Mikimoto and featuring a sweeping score by Kôsuke Yamashita and a kind of Greek chorus embodied by the unusual Japanese band the Pascals, is not merely about the travails of one extended family; it is also very much about the rebuilding of Japanese society in the wake of WWII, the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, and the ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, all of the clocks and watches in Seven Weeks are perpetually stopped at 2:45 pm, the exact time the horrific 3/11 events began. Obayashi also investigates the Soviet invasion of Sakhalin Island in August 1945 and the abuse of Korean migrant workers in Japanese mines as he explores the complex issue of the meaning of home. Seven Weeks is a beautifully told tale of memory and loss, of art and war, a summing up not only of Obayashi’s career but of twentieth-century Japan, with plenty of the director’s unique trademark style. “How do I paint the world?” Mitsuo asks at one point, something Obayashi has achieved in this deeply involving and wonderfully mysterious film. Fortunately for all of us, Obayashi was not quite done painting the world, continuing a legacy that is at last being celebrated here in the West.

TRAGEDIES OF YOUTH — NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI’S WAR TRILOGY: CASTING BLOSSOMS TO THE SKY (KONO SORA NO HANA: NAGAOKA HANABI MONOGATARI) (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2014)
japansociety.org

“If people made pretty fireworks instead of bombs, there wouldn’t have been any wars,” says journalist Reiko Endō (Yasuko Matsuyuki), quoting wandering artist Kiyoshi Yamashita at the start of Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s Casting Blossoms to the Sky. The first of the eclectic Japanese auteur’s War Trilogy, the film, based on actual experiences, is essentially an audiovisual essay, “Reiko Endō’s Wonderland: A Journey of Emotions to Nagaoka,” detailing Endō’s trip to Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture, as the local citizenry share true tales of WWII and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. (Nagaoka took in more than a thousand evacuees from Fukushima.) Ōbayashi goes back and forth between the past and the present, from the summer in 1945 when Nagaoka was bombed by the United States to the latest edition of the city’s annual fireworks display, which honor the victims of Pearl Harbor, the bombings of Nagaoka, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and the 2011 disaster.

With the day of the fireworks show approaching, Endō rides with wise cabdriver Akiyoshi Muraoka (Takashi Sasano), as she, and we, discover the city’s history of war and remembrance. Endō meets with her ex-boyfriend, Kenichi Katayama (Masahiro Takashima), who is in charge of the school play at Chuetsu High and chooses There’s Still Time Until a War by a mysterious girl named Jana Motoki (Minami Inomata) who rides a unicycle through the halls and down the streets of the neighborhood. Endō learns from the inhabitants themselves, including military history researcher Takashi Mishima (Akiyoshi Muraoka) and triathlete and potato farmer Goro Matsushita (Toshio Kakei), who built a memorial using a fragment from one of the incendiary bombs dropped on Nagaoka; war veteran and local fireworks legend Seijiro Nose (Akira Emoto); reporter Wakako Inoue (Natsuka Harada), who walks Endō through important parts of the city; Yoshie Yamafuji, who lost much of her family in the bombings; artist Yasunari Honmura, who uses his paintings as reminders of the horrors of war; and numerous other survivors and relatives of the dead.

Journalist Reiko Endō (Yasuko Matsuyuki) goes on quite a ride with cabdriver Akiyoshi Muraoka (Takashi Sasano) in Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s Casting Blossoms to the Sky

Casting Blossoms to the Sky is made in Obayashi’s unique style, with visually stunning backdrops (real and green-screened), bright, brash color schemes, professional and nonprofessional actors, and computer-generated imagery that can feel rather goofy. The film was imaginatively shot by Yûdai Katô and Hisaki Sanbongi, with lovely, often garishly beautiful production design by Kôichi Takeuchi and playful editing by Obayashi and Hisaki Sanbongi, using cute cinematic techniques. The characters sometimes turn and speak directly into the camera, further establishing the film as a cautionary tale.

“I don’t know anything about war and it’s never crossed my mind,” a young student named Ryo says to Katayama, who replies, “It’s the citizens’ duty to tell the story. There are adults who think war is necessary but not the children. That’s why it’s up to the children to make peace.”

In one of the most moving scenes, a black-and-white flashback to 2009 during a fierce storm, Endō’s mother (Shiho Fujimura) says to her, “Life is connected,” a statement that is at the heart of Obayashi’s message. But no matter how didactic some of the dialogue is and how silly the visuals can get, accompanied by Joe Hisaishi’s emotional score, Casting Blossoms to the Sky has an innate charm that is so endearing you will forgive its flaws. At one point Katayama explains, “The fireworks are a prayer.” So is Casting Blossoms to the Sky, which, like fireworks, is quite a sight to behold.

MAMA WEED (LA DARONNE)

Isabelle Huppert stars as an unlikely drug kingpin in Mama Weed

MAMA WEED (LA DARONNE) (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2020)
Village East Cinema by Angelika
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, July 16
www.musicboxfilms.com
www.angelikafilmcenter.com

Isabelle Huppert is luminous once again, even in the hokey comic thriller Mama Weed (La Daronne), opening July 16 at the Village East. The French grand dame stars as Patience Portefeux, a widow with two grown daughters who is out of money, threatened with eviction by her tough landlord, Mrs. Fo (Jade Nadja Nguyen). Patience works as a French-Arabic translator for the police, currently enmeshed in stopping a major drug deal that secretly involves Khadidja (Farida Ouchani), the nurse who cares for Patience’s elderly mother (Liliane Rovère).

In order to protect Khadidja and her son, Choca (Mourad Boudaoud), who is in on the deal with his friend Scotch (Rachid Guellaz), Patience warns her in advance. The deal goes bad, the drugs disappear, but Patience decides to track them down herself, and when she finds them she concocts a plan to become a local drug lord so she can once again live life in the high style to which she was accustomed. While Choca and Scotch are minor leaguers who are easily manipulated, Patience has to be more careful with the extremely dangerous Cherkaoui brothers (Youssef Sahraoui and Kamel Guenfoud), who want their hash stash back. She does all this under the nose of the determined police chief, Philippe (Hippolyte Girardot), who is in charge of the case and whom she just happens to be dating.

Liberally adapted by director Jean-Paul Salomé (Les Braqueuses, Playing Dead) and Hannelore Cayre from Cayre’s novel The Godmother with the participation of Huppert, Mama Weed can’t quite figure out what it wants to be, treading the line between comedy, police procedural, romance, thriller, and widow in a man’s world trying to rise above adversity. Looking better than ever in her late sixties, Huppert is mesmerizing to watch, especially as Marité Coutard’s costumes get more and more colorful and complex, but you’ll run out of, er, patience as the plot grows more and more absurd. Patience is neither Walter White (Bryan Cranston) from Breaking Bad nor Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) from Weeds; her success relies on too much plain luck that stretches the bounds of credulity.

Winner of the Jacques Deray Prize for best detective film and nominated for a César for Best Adapted Screenplay, Mama Weed has its moments, especially in Patience’s evolving relationship with Mrs. Fo, but the hole-ridden story feels like smoking weed of questionable quality — you’re never sure it’s truly getting you where you want to be.

INAUGURAL DRAMA BOOK SHOP IN-PERSON SIGNING — IN THE HEIGHTS: FINDING HOME

Who: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Jeremy McCarter
What: Book signing
Where: The Drama Book Shop, 266 West Thirty-Ninth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: Wednesday, July 21, 2:00 (tickets on sale Friday, July 16, 10:00 am)
Why: In 2002, a theater group started rehearsing a new musical in the tiny Arthur Seelen Theatre in the basement of the Drama Book Shop, which was founded in 1917 by the Drama League and was bought by Arthur and Rozanne Seelen in 1958. With the future of the beloved store in jeopardy, it was purchased in January 2019 by two of the primaries involved with that rehearsal, director Thomas Kail and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with producer Jeffrey Seller and theater impresario James L. Nederlander. The production was In the Heights, cowritten by Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Broadway smash that was nominated for thirteen Tonys and won four, including Best Musical. Delayed by the pandemic lockdown, the new store, designed by David Korins, opened June 10 on West Thirty-Ninth St., and it is celebrating with its first in-store book signing, a rather big one.

On July 21 at 2:00, composer-lyricist-star Miranda, librettist Hudes, and theater writer Jeremy McCarter will be signing copies of their new tome, In the Heights: Finding Home (Penguin Random House, June 2021, $40), following up on the virtual launch that took place last month. The book opens with an introduction by McCarter that begins, “The actors took their bows, the crowd finished cheering, and everybody headed for the doors. Spotting a friend, I cut across the lobby. I asked, Did you just see what I just saw? Or words to that effect. It’s been fourteen years, so I can’t remember exactly what I said that night. But I do remember exactly how In the Heights made me feel.” The show was turned into a major motion picture that was released on June 10, in theaters and on HBO Max, to wide acclaim and a casting controversy. Limited tickets for the bookstore event, in which the authors will not sign anything other than the books and no photos with them are allowed, go on sale July 16 at 10:00 am, and they’re likely to go fast, so don’t hesitate if you want to keep sharing that feeling.

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS

Documentary explores the creation and legacy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s D-Man in the Waters (photo courtesy Rosalynde LeBlanc)

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS (Rosalynde LeBlanc & Tom Hurwitz, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 16
212-727-8110
www.d-mandocumentary.com
filmforum.org

In 1989, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented the world premiere of D-Man in the Waters at the prestigious Joyce Theater in New York City, a physically demanding, emotional work born out of the AIDS crisis, dealing with tragedy and loss in the wake of the death of Zane, Jones’s personal and professional partner, at the age of thirty-nine in 1988. Directors Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz take a deep dive into the history of the dance and its lasting impact more than thirty years later in the captivating documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, opening July 16 at Film Forum.

“What is D-Man? Is it alive now? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it one of inspiration?” Jones tells fifteen Loyola Marymount dancers who are staging the piece under the direction of LeBlanc, a former company member who runs the Jones/Zane Educational Partnership at the school, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Dance. Jones continues, “Makes you want to get all your shit together, your community together, take responsibility, be beautiful, be fierce — is that what it is? I don’t know what it is. . . . What do they share that is so big, so tragic that you need a piece like this to move it and give it body?”

LeBlanc, who also produced the film, and two-time Emmy-winning cinematographer Hurwitz, the son of longtime Martha Graham dancer, choreographer, and teacher Jane Dudley, talk to most of the original cast of D-Man, many of whom have gone on to form their own companies: Arthur Avilés, Seán Curran, Lawrence Goldhuber, Gregg Hubbard, Heidi Latsky, Janet Lilly, and Betsy McCracken, who, along with Jones and his sister Johari Briggs, share intimate stories of working with Jones and Zane and the importance of the piece as the arts community was being ravaged by AIDS. Sometimes holding back tears, they speak lovingly of Zane and Demian Acquavella, nicknamed “D-Man,” who died at the age of thirty-two in 1990. “He was always a boy, but always a bit of a devilish boy, and the dancing was also that way,” Jones remembers.

Through new and old interviews, home video and archival photographs, and exciting footage from the dance’s original rehearsals and Joyce premiere, LeBlanc, Hurwitz, and editor Ann Collins choreograph a gracefully flowing, compelling narrative as the documentary participants discuss specific movements — Latsky’s attempts at a jump and Curran’s memories of a duet with Acquavella in which their foreheads have to keep touching are wonderful — and LeBlanc tries to reach inside the Loyola Marymount performers to motivate them. They might have the movement down, but D-Man requires more than that to be successful. “Do you dare to let the stakes really be high?” she asks as they search for contemporary issues that impact them similarly to how AIDS affected the creation of the work, which is set to Felix Mendelssohn’s 1825 Octet for Strings, which the German composer wrote at the age of sixteen. “There was some healing, cathartic ritual in the making and the doing of this dance that sustained us,” Curran says, a feeling LeBlanc wants to instill in the college students.

“This work is not about anybody’s epidemic,” Jones, a Kennedy Center Honoree, MacArthur Grant awardee, and Tony winner who is the artistic director of New York Live Arts, said in a statement about the film. “It is about the dark spirit of what is happening in the world and how you push back against it.” Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters gets to the heart of that spirit by revealing the legacy, and the future, of a seminal dance piece that continues to find its place on an ever-evolving planet.

LeBlanc and Hurwitz will be at Film Forum to discuss the film at the 7:00 shows on July 16 and 17 and will participate in a live, virtual Q&A with Jones at 8:00 on July 21. Jones, whose riveting Afterwardsness at Park Avenue Armory in May explored the Covid-19 pandemic, isolation, and racial injustice, will return to the space this fall with Deep Blue Sea, a monumental work for more than one hundred community members and dancers that begins with a solo by Jones and incorporates texts by Martin Luther King Jr. and Herman Melville, with water again playing a critical role.

COUSINS

Cousins follows a Māori family over more than half a century

COUSINS (Ainsley Gardiner & Briar Grace-Smith, 2021)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 2
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
www.arraynow.com/cousins

The Māori film Cousins is a heart-wrenching story of an indigenous family in New Zealand (Aotearoa) torn apart by colonialism and bigotry as they try to hold on to their traditions. The film, directed by the award-winning Māori duo Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, opens in the mid-twentieth century with Mata (Te Raukura Gray) in green, Makareta (Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels) in blue, and Missy (Keyahne Patrick-Williams) in red playing on a lush landscape of rolling hills and a twisting river. “Three cousins,” a narrator says in Māori. “Their paths woven across time. Their lives separate. Their lives converge. They separate again. This is how it must be.”

The scene cuts to the modern day, as Mata (Tanea Heke), walking down a city street, stops at a corner, waits for the light to turn green, slowly removes her shoes while reciting a nursery rhyme in her head, and begins to cross only when the red walk sign starts flashing, as if she is inviting danger. Wandering through an outdoor market, she appears to be homeless and broke. Meanwhile, Markareta (Grace-Smith, who also wrote the screenplay) and Missy (Rachel House) are fighting the government’s attempts to take some of their land — and wondering where Mata is. Sent to an orphanage by her father (Jack Sergent), Mata was “adopted” by a white New Zealander, Mrs. Parkinson (Sylvia Rands), who changed her name to May Parker and used her as a servant, keeping her away from her family, who have been searching for her for fifty years.

Gardiner and Grace-Smith go back and forth between three central time periods, following the cousins as children, young adults (with Ana Scotney as Mata, Tioreore Melbourne as Markareta, and Hariata Moriarty as Missy), and in the present as they try to maintain their heritage in a world that wants to pass them by. Awarded the 2021 People’s Choice for Best Feature Drama at the Māoriland Film Festival in New Zealand, Cousins, adapted from the 1992 novel by Patricia Grace, is infused with many elements of the Māori way of life, including whakapapa (unbreakable genealogical links), kaupapa (philosophy), whānau (family), kaitiaki (guardianship of the land), Te Ao Māori (world view), whenua (land), and Tikanga Māori (cultural practice), treating them with honesty and respect, not othering them. It was shot in Te Waiiti Marae on Lake Rotoiti with the guidance of Muriwai Ihakara, who plays Wi, and the local Ngāti Hinekura and Ngāti Pikiao people, many of whom appear in small roles.

Raymond Edwards’s cinematography is gentle and beautiful, accompanied by composer Warren Maxwell’s subtly emotional score. The nine actresses who portray the three cousins are exceptional, but Gray, Scotney, and Heke stand out as Mata, who rarely speaks, overwhelmed by her childhood trauma; Heke’s eyes are particularly haunting. By the end of the film, which runs July 2–9 at the Angelika, you’ll feel like you’re part of the family, feeling their pain and love as tears well up.

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Hou Hsiao-hsien gem Flowers of Shanghai explores complex relationships between wealthy patrons and courtesans

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (HAI SHANG HUA) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
July 2-20, $15
www.filmlinc.org

Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty-five years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. Film at Lincoln Center’s wide-ranging “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues with one of the New York Film Festival staple’s most elegant tales, Flowers of Shanghai. The 1998 film, being shown in a dramatic 4K restoration, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping Bin’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.

Most scenes end by fading quietly to black, then introducing the woman protagonist of the next section — Crimson, Jasmin, Pearl (Carina Lau), Jade (Shuan Fang), and Emerald (Michelle Reis) — as the women gossip and Crimson and Hong, and other pairs, try to figure out what they want out of life and from one another. In Flowers of Shanghai, Hou explores class differences, gender roles, the Asian notion of saving face, and intimacy with grace and sophistication. When the film fades out for the final time, viewers are left knowing they’ve just experienced something special, a stunning work that uses the technologies of cinema to delve into the very nature of humanity.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” runs through August 26 with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Nuria Giménez’s My Mexican Bretzel, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.

KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Min Sanchez, Kenny Scharf, and Oliver Sanchez pose in front of Scharf’s artwork in Bahia, Brazil (photo by Tereza Scharf)

KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (Malia Scharf & Max Basch, 2020)
Available on demand
www.kennyscharfmovie.com

“I have a balancing act between being a responsible adult and the Peter Pan syndrome because I just feel like life is so much about the moment, so I want every moment fun and beautiful,” Kenny Scharf says in the new documentary Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide. “It’s not reality.” Codirectors Max Basch and Malia Scharf — one of the artist’s daughters — try to make every moment of the film, now streaming on demand, fun and beautiful, often reaching that goal.

Shot over a period of eleven years, When Worlds Collide follows Scharf, who was born in 1958 in Los Angeles and moved to Manhattan to attend SVA, from his early days as a graffiti artist and muralist, when he met and became great friends with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and hung out with Andy Warhol at the Factory, to his vast popularity creating fantastical, colorful creatures in paintings and sculptures, from the lean years to his current obsession with recycling. “Use everything,” he says, extolling us to ”not waste precious plastic when you can turn it into bathroom sculpture” as he adds a plastic cup and straw to an ever-evolving work above his toilet.

Scharf and Basch, who also served as editor and one of the cinematographers, speak with former Ferus Gallery owner Irving Blum, art collector Peter Brant, gallerists Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Shafrazi, writer and poet Carter Ratcliff, art historian Richard Marshall, Whitney curator Jane Panetta, former Scharf assistant Min Sanchez, author and psychologist Gabor Maté, collectors Andy and Christine Hall, real estate developer Tony Goldman, and curator Dan Cameron, who all offer unique perspectives on Scharf as a person and an artist. “There’s no separation between Kenny and his art,” his friend and fellow artist Kitty Brophy says. There are also old and new interviews with such artists as Bruno Schmidt, Ed Ruscha, Samantha McEwen, Robert Williams, Marilyn Minter, KAWS, Dennis Hopper, and Yoko Ono as well as Scharf’s mother, Rose; wife, Tereza; daughters, Zena and Malia; and grandkids Jet and Lua, who share their thoughts and are seen in home movie footage.

“He just created a family where we felt we were understood and accepted for who we are,” actress and performance artist Ann Magnuson says. “The main way to communicate was to get out on the street, and the message got out there and of course the attention came, and then it started to unravel a bit when the success, the money, the fame, and the uptown world started paying attention to the downtown world. Some of that wonderful, naïve idealism was lost.”

The film doesn’t shy away from the devastation of the AIDS crisis or Scharf’s dry periods, when his style of surreal Pop art was out of favor, but he continues to create and is a fan favorite at international art fairs with his eye-catching work. He gets tearful when talking about Haring, shares his love of nature and cartoons (especially The Flintstones and The Jetsons), collects trash on the beach, remembers the influential Club 57, discusses his breakthrough painting, 1984’s When the Worlds Collide, and describes his penchant for pareidolia, seeing faces everywhere. It’s fascinating to watch him stand in front of a canvas, painting right from his imagination, without preparatory sketches. He comes off as a driven artist and dedicated family man who can be an endearing mensch. “Many people think I’m crazy, and I think that’s okay,” he says with a laugh.