Dash Snow was here for a good time, not a long time. A notorious figure of New York’s post 9/11 underground, Snow was catapulted from graffiti tagger to international art star during his lifetime, which was cut tragically short when he died by heroin overdose at 27 years old in 2009. He was born into an influential family, but defiantly left his privilege behind to make his own way as an artist on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1990s. His artistic expression moved through graffiti, to photography and mixed media, and he led a hard-partying lifestyle of reckless excess, creativity and destruction with his chosen family of fellow artists, friends and lovers. 

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunn, one of Snow’s countercultural clique, created this deeply intimate portrait of her friend using a wealth of vivid archival footage and interviews with artists and gallerists who were in Snow’s orbit during that time. Their affectionate stories of Snow’s gleefully boundary-pushing exhibitions and the drug- and alcohol-fuelled nights will make your head spin. Snow’s peers Ryan McGinley, Dan Colen and Kunle Martins feature, and the film is soundtracked by some of the scene-defining musicians of that era, like LCD Soundsystem, Cat Power and Nick Cave with Grinderman.