Richard Hambleton was a founder of the street art movement before succumbing to drugs and homelessness. Rediscovered 20 years later, he gets a second chance. But will he take it? The movie Shadowman tells the true story.
Before Banksy, there was Hambleton.
In the 1980s, Richard Hambleton was the Shadowman, a specter in the night who painted hundreds of startling silhouettes on the walls of lower Manhattan and, along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, sparked the street art movement.
After drug addiction and homelessness sent him spinning out of the art scene for 20 years, Hambleton gets a second chance, but will he take it?
Shadowman plunges the viewer into the chaotic life of a forgotten artist, from early fame as a painter and denizen of the Lower East Side, through his struggles with heroin, to his surprising comeback as street art exploded to become one of the most popular and lucrative art movements in the world.
Featuring rare footage of 1980s music and art, which bring to the screen an indelible portrait of New York City from a lost, transformative time, Shadowman is a trip down a rabbit hole into the mystifying, agonizing, exhilarating, and sometimes frightening ,world of a brilliant artist in the thrall of creation and addiction.
