The rapper Kid Cudi has announced that he will write, direct and play the lead in a biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat. In an Instagram post on 21 October, Cudi revealed the project, titled JEAN, describing it as a love letter to the artist, to the 1980s and to New York City. Production is scheduled to begin next year. The announcement was accompanied by a mock-up promotional poster and black-and-white photographs of Cudi posing as Basquiat in a large studio.

Cudi said that Basquiat has inspired his own career throughout, and that portraying him would be the greatest honour, allowing him to tell the artist's story in a way audiences have not seen before. He described the writing process as a challenge he welcomed, involving extensive research, reading and conversations with people who knew Basquiat personally. No further casting or release details have been announced.

The project extends Cudi's recent move into visual art under his own name as a painter, Scotty Ramon. He showed paintings in a group presentation at Art Cologne in 2025 and held his first solo exhibition, Echoes of the Past, at the Paris space of the gallery Ruttkowski;68 this January. The Basquiat film therefore arrives as the latest step in a crossover between his music career and a growing practice as a visual artist.

Basquiat, who lived from 1960 to 1988, remains one of the defining figures of late twentieth-century art, moving from the streets of New York to international gallery fame in a few short years. A biopic directed by a musician who is also a practising painter promises a portrait shaped from inside the creative life rather than from outside it. Whether JEAN can match the energy of its subject will only become clear once filming begins, but the announcement alone has already placed Basquiat back at the centre of the cultural conversation.