When the Big Apple was at its most rotten during the economic decline of the 70s and 80s, a new generation of artists pushed through the cracks of the busted footpaths in the city’s most neglected suburbs. Ignored by the minimalist Soho galleries and academic art critics, they staked their ground by tagging subway trains and crumbling tenements.

Some, like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria this month, had the wiles to barge their way into the mainstream without appointment or anointment. Equally vital to the era’s enduring influence was Colab, a renegade collective of activist artists in whose orbit Basquiat floated; the so-called Downtown 500 of artists and musicians who crossed paths at the Mudd Club, CBGB and Club 57; and early tastemakers such as Fab 5 Freddy, an artist and filmmaker who could see the burgeoning scenes of graffiti, rapping and breakdancing as forming a larger cultural movement that would eventually become a global phenomenon.

Here are five films and TV shows to give you an insight into that world.

1. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017)

Living in the lawless Lower East Side, Basquiat was sleeping on friends’ sofas, sleeping with friends, and being sure to turn up at the right places – and that’s the era explored in this documentary drawing on the memories of his art peers.

Basquiat and old school friend, Al Diaz, were tagging “SAMO”, their joke for “same old shit”, getting increasingly surreal with the accompanying messaging. The Village Voice ran an article on this SAMO phenomenon – decades ahead of similar mystery surrounding Bansky (who recently left a mural outside a Basquiat exhibition in London) – and Basquiat saw his opportunity. He barred Diaz from using the tag and started spray-painting cryptic SAMO quotes around Soho, the centre of the “legitimate” art world, and soon enough shrewdly revealed himself as the author. About the same time, Fab 5 Freddy began organising “burners” – large-scale murals at people’s workplaces for a fee – an idea that caught Haring’s attention.

ALSO WATCH: Basquiat (1996), which stars Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat, Courtney Love as one of his lovers, and Bowie as Warhol.

2. Downtown 81 (2000)

A fictional day in the life of a struggling artist (Basquiat as himself), with cameos from Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the Plastics, DNA, Tav Falco, Amos Poe, Fab 5 Freddy, Vincent Gallo and Blondie. (Side note: Basquiat appeared in Blondie’s Rapture video, and it’s hard not to listen to her song In the Flesh – “Went walking one day on the Lower East Side / Met you with a girlfriend, you were so fine” – without considering his legendary impact on women, including Madonna.) Even the infamous Tribeca venue Mudd Club, where Basquiat’s band Gray played, makes a cameo. Basquiat provides a meandering beat-poetry narrative – “I’m an artist. When you tell people that they say, ‘What’s your medium?’ I usually say, ‘Extra large’ ” – and contributes to the soundtrack, which also features Lydia Lunch, DNA and Suicide.

ALSO WATCH: TV Party: The Documentary (2005) remembers the public access cable show that broadcast in NYC between 1978 and 1982. Guests included Basquiat, Debbie Harry and David Byrne. Amos Poe – who made 1976’s The Blank Generation about NYC punk – directed the show.

3. Beat Street (1984)

Here’s a hip-hop film so corny that it could almost be a tourism ad for the South Bronx (and might have influenced the equally wholesome Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), but with time it’s accrued kitsch value. Even back then it was a revelation to kids growing up in, say, Ohio.

Ramon, Chollie and Kenny walk the hood with decks in hand, cheerfully taking photos of graffed-up subway trains and delivering cheesy raps into the mic at block parties. Ramon is an ambitious graffiti artist whose tag “RAMO – if art is a crime, may God forgive me” – is a hat-tip to one of Basquiat’s SAMO tags that had near-identical text. Kenny wants to be DJ-ing at Manhattan clubs. Chollie has a bigger vision for album covers and T-shirts and breaking into TV. Beat Street captures the feeling of a culture that’s about to explode into the mainstream.

ALSO WATCH: The Get Down (2016). Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix drama series is also set in the South Bronx, but in the late 70s when hip-hop was still germinating.

4. Martha (2019)

Martha Cooper has been an anthropological photographer for National Geographic, but was accepted and trusted by kids in the Bronx whose lives she documented back in the 70s and 80s, when the city’s administrators were waging a war on graffiti.

This new documentary cuts between then and now – at 75, Cooper still hustles through nocturnal streets and down railway tracks with her camera. She had been the first female photographer at the New York Post, but it was her underground book, Subway Art, published in 1984 with fellow photographer Henry Chalfant, that became a bible for generations of artists, with copies shoplifted, photocopied and pirated.

ALSO WATCH: Wild Style (1983). Bronx enigma Zoro, played by real-life graffiti artist Lee Quiñones, is shadowed by a Village Voice reporter (shades of SAMO-era Basquiat yet again) as he bombs trains. Debbie Harry, Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash make appearances.

5. Paris is Burning (1990)

This was filmed in the mid-80s at the Harlem drag balls that turned African American and Hispanic gay men, drag queens and transgender women – many verging on homelessness – into “future legends”. Newcomers were assigned to “houses”, with the house often serving as the family they never had. As well as drag, there were catwalk categories such as town and country, executive realness, and military, in which participants worked to pass as straight men from societies that would not accept them.

The scene most famously gave birth to voguing. Dancer Willi Ninja explains: “Like breakdancing, the dance takes from the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt. It also takes on some forms of gymnastics. They both strive for perfect lines in the body, awkward positions, and it goes one step further.”

Many of the participants who spoke so eloquently about the evolution of their complex culture were later lost to AIDS-related illnesses. Side note: although not depicted, Love Ball participants included Iman, Thierry Mugler, Leigh Bowery and Haring. Haring also designed the Voguing grand prize trophy.

ALSO WATCH: The Universe of Keith Haring (2008), in which the artist is remembered through collaborators and friends such as Yoko Ono, Fab 5 Freddy and David LaChapelle.

• Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, from 1 December 2019 to 11 April 2020