Fine, since you keep asking, Kid Cudi will write, direct, and star in a Basquiat movie

Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose. However, “for years,” Cudi says, people have asked him to play the artist in a film to zero results. The rapper has had enough and is spearheading the project himself, showing off some test shots and explaining that writing a “film about someone who existed was a challenge, but it was a welcome one” and the “biggest honor” to tell the story of someone who “has inspired me through out my career,” before sending “this one” out to “all those dreamers out there.

Fans have long pointed out what they see as a physical resemblance between Cudi and Basquiat. One unofficial viral music video for the Kid Cudi song “Ghost!” uses clips from Basquiat’s feature film Downtown 81. For his part, Cudi has referenced the artist’s work in the past. There’s no public record of people begging him to play Basquiat in a film, so we have to imagine that at least some of that is fan-casting.

This wouldn’t be the narrative feature film about Basquiat. In 1996, Jeffrey Wright took the lead in the biopic Basquiat, which entered the Criterion Collection last year.