Netflix's Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell breaks one of the rapper's own commandments by being a literal puff piece

Slate

"A common pitfall of documentaries about incredibly famous people is that they take the substance of their subject’s significance for granted; to paraphrase one of Biggie’s commandments, they’re high on their own supply," says Jack Hamilton. "I Got a Story to Tell features a lot of men—as is so often the case with these kinds of movies, it’s mostly men—emphatically asserting the supremacy of Biggie’s music without actually saying all that much about it. For an uninitiated viewer who just wants to learn who Biggie was and what made him great, I Got a Story to Tell doesn’t offer all that much, with a few exceptions...Far too much of the film just feels like a rehash, with Diddy, Lil’ Cease, and other mainstays of Biggieography telling the usual stories in the usual awed tones. I Got a Story to Tell dutifully hits the familiar beats: the legendary battle on Bedford Avenue, the 'Unsigned Hype' write-up in The Source, the dizzying success of Bad Boy and escalating Death Row beef, and of course the early morning hours of March 9, 1997, when his life was ended at a Los Angeles stoplight. There are some prominent omissions as well, most notably that of Lil’ Kim, whose absence contrasts starkly with the ample screen time afforded to her fellow Junior M.A.F.I.A. associates Cease and Chico Del Vec. Most puzzling is the bizarre amount of time that the film spends on Biggie’s relatively brief career as a drug dealer in Bed-Stuy. To say this is a well-trod topic is an understatement: Biggie brought it up in nearly every song he ever recorded. But like any great crime writer, Biggie’s interest in drug dealing wasn’t in the act itself but rather the metaphorical power it provided, a narrative terrain through which to explore power, greed, injustice, violence, sex, and pretty much everything else. Drug dealing is interesting in Biggie’s music because Biggie was a genius, not because dealing drugs is inherently interesting. I Got a Story to Tell is a documentary about a musician that spends much of its running time on a day job that its protagonist held before he became a full-time musician. It’s a baffling decision that also comes off as immensely dated, a dusty relic of the authenticity-mad 1990s, when there was a belief that audiences needed to know that rappers were actually living the lives they rapped about."

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• Biggie's story finally gets a proper retelling: "I Got a Story to Tell is something of a social history of the Notorious B.I.G. and the world he inhabited, by turns a history lesson on a first-generation Jamaican immigrant and how that experience would color his life’s work and also a clinic in how geographical proximities and common interests can birth a scene," says Craig Jenkins. "The doc posits Biggie as an intersection where several disparate paths meet and then sets off to see where a few of them lead. At the cost of skipping memorable performances — like the day in 1995 when Wallace performed 'Juicy' and 'Big Poppa' on MTV’s spring break edition of The Grind wearing a Coogi sweater in the Lake Havasu, Arizona, heat or the unforgettable Bad Boy showcase at that year’s Source Awards, a contentious night in the east-west rap spat but also one where B.I.G. cleaned up, taking home trophies for New Artist, Lyricist, Live Performer, and Album of the Year — I Got a Story to Tell visualizes the making of the artist more than the unmaking. Colorful characters in Wallace’s periphery, like Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Lil Cease and C-Gutta (who you may remember as the kidnapper in 'What’s Beef?' or the buddy selling blue tops in Jay-Z’s 'Brooklyn’s Finest' or the bodyguard to M.A.F.I.A. alum Lil Kim who did a 16-year bid after the shootout outside Hot 97 in 2001), get extra face time. Home movies from Biggie’s friend D-Roc blend with interviews of close associates and family members to paint a fuller picture than the one we know."
• Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell is a frustratingly thin take on a rap legend’s story: "Directed by Emmett Malloy, Biggie is a paper-thin account of one of hip-hop’s most mythologized figures, tracing the broad strokes of his tragically short biography," says Joshua Rivera. "Produced by his mother, Voletta Wallace, and Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs — whose record label released Biggie’s entire catalogue — the movie tells Biggie’s story via testimony from people who are exclusively interested in portraying him in the most radiant light, for reasons that are either obvious, like in Voletta’s case, or arguably self-serving, as with Combs. Combs’ contributions are a big reason I Got a Story to Tell is so frustrating. The mogul and former kingmaker is among the most prominent subjects interviewed, and he works overtime to enshrine Biggie as even more of a deity than he already is. Combs is a valuable interview because he was there, as a key figure in Biggie’s meteoric ascent and his escalating conflicts. But Combs is only interested in framing Biggie as the Zeus of Rap Olympus, a title he says he knew Biggie would hold from day one. Combs is less interested in divulging anything personal, and the context he offers would be better served coming from someone who won’t profit from the legacy he’s diligently burnishing. Worse, I Got A Story to Tell spins its tale without even mentioning many of its characters. No one speaks of Faith Evans, a monumental artist in her own right who briefly married Biggie and had a child with him. Suge Knight, Combs’ West Coast counterpart and a key figure in the ’90s hip-hop turf war, is also ignored. Both of them are hard to extricate from Biggie’s story — they actually appear in the archival footage the documentary pulls from — but for Malloy’s purposes, they might as well not exist."
• Biggie immediately establishes that we’ll get to see a more honest, personal side of the late MC
• The goal of Biggie is to change some of the conventional wisdom on Wallace, moving beyond his semiautobiographical tales of crime and cash