The Cosmic Knockout

Issa Ibrahim was born an artist in Jamaica, Queens, N.Y. into a bohemian family, his father a jazz musician and mother a painter who encouraged his painting gifts. In 1990 at age 24, in a marijuana induced delusion, he suffered an extreme psychotic meltdown culminating in a horrific family tragedy and a subsequent twenty-year institutionalization in Creedmoor Psychiatric Center as an insanity plea pariah on a locked ward of an insane asylum, a commitment that was also a potential life sentence. He relied on his gifts as an artist to process his trauma, document the horrors he was living, and paint his future.

This musical documentary is Ibrahim’s attempt to make sense of his fantastical series of artworks he called The Cosmic Knockout, painted in the overnights with smuggled in acrylics on unstretched canvas, then rolled up and protected from bureaucratic plunder. The original songs, which flesh out the stories behind the illustrations, were all surreptitiously recorded in various ward bathrooms and his bedroom in Creedmoor.

Inspired by science fiction, comic books and 1970’s Saturday morning cartoons, and looking like movie posters to a film too outrageous to make, infused with the culture biases he found in the institution, Ibrahim employed century old racist iconography to illustrate and underscore his beliefs about how he was perceived. An ill-fated affair with his therapist, who threw him under the bus in favor of a quiet departure and full pension, saw her become a voracious crimson 50-foot woman yielding Ibrahim’s rebirth as the sexualized hero ‘Superstar’, a makeshift messiah named after the Jesus Christ musical and referencing the Arabic translation of his first name. Strident staff, escaping patients, and other beings from his psychotic subconscious, all reflections of himself, manifest as myriad abominations, surveilled at every turn by a gigantic eyeball, revealing what should be a place of healing as a haunted graveyard where there is no hiding place, and no one is safe. A poignant, coded commentary of life in the mad house.

With lost and found footage married to Ibrahim's artwork and his asylum pop music, punctuated by post-release interviews and audio excerpts from his memoir, The Cosmic Knockout is guerrilla filmmaking at its finest.