Portrait of Biggie celebrates MC’s talent and hustle
There are only two Notorious B.I.G. albums, each representing a different side of the late hiphop star. The first, “Ready to Die” (1994), is a suite of grimy crime stories interrupted by the occasional flash of good times. The second, “Life After Death,” released 16 days after his murder in 1997, is more of a party, a tworecord collection from a kid who made it big and wasn’t shy about showing some celebratory flash.
The new documentary, “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” (available on Netflix on Monday, March 1) was made in the spirit of the earlier work and the younger man, the hungry hustler hanging out on Brooklyn street corners with his friends. Sometimes that meant selling crack; young Christopher Wallace was very much a part of the neighborhood street economy. Increasingly, once he came to realize his outlandish skills behind the mike (on those same street corners), it meant making music and chronicling the same criminal activity in which he once engaged.
It’s directed by Emmett Malloy, who has a slate of music video credits (including Metallica and the
White Stripes), and the film was made with the cooperation of Biggie’s estate. This makes “Story” a very authorized biography. There’s never a doubt that it exists to celebrate its subject’s life. But Biggie’s inner circle, including his mom, Voletta Wallace, and his friend and producer, Sean “Diddy” Combs (both executive producers on the documentary), aren’t here to nominate him for sainthood. They know him too well for that.
There’s no slick narration or rapidfire editing in “Story,” and there’s very little studio music.
No one tries to explain who killed Biggie or rap rival Tupac Shakur. A good deal of the vintage footage was shot by Biggie’s running buddy, Damion “DRoc” Butler; there’s a lot of horsing around, smoking weed and capturing the hysteria of live audiences.
Butler is also one of several oncamera interview subjects, some of them famous (Combs, the most important behindthescenes figure in Biggie’s career, describes the lightningbolt revelation of hearing his future protege rhyme for the first time). Most of them are old friends from around the way, mentors and fellow hustlers who were there from the beginning.
Biggie was uniquely gifted from the time he began putting rhymes together. The jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison, who mentored young Biggie, compares the rapper’s melodic sense of rhythm to drumming legend Max Roach. Given the title of the film, it could use a little more focus on Biggie’s considerable storytelling abilities. But the rhyme vignettes played here more than showcase his gifts for wordplay and cinematic imagery. He was a poet of crime. From the “Ready to Die” song “Warning”: “There’s gonna be a lot of slow singin’ and/ flower bringin’/ if my burglar alarm starts ringin’.” Never has a funeral prediction been issued with such imagination.
The film walks a line between reverence and regret, especially as it draws closer to the morning of March 9, 1997, when Biggie was gunned down in a driveby shooting in Los Angeles (six months after Tupac was the victim of a driveby in Las Vegas). He was 24.
Had he survived life’s subsequent slings and arrows, Biggie would have turned 50 next year. It’s hard to fathom. He never had the chance to become a grownup, let alone a middleaged man. It’s this giant kid who takes center stage in ”I Got a Story to Tell.” Long live his rhymes.