Music documentaries tend to follow certain beats – upbringing; career beginnings; meteoric rise; inevitable fall. The director Allen Hughes is smart enough not to draw entirely outside these lines with Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur – his five-part docuseries about Tupac, one of the most famous and influential rappers of all time, and his Black Panther mother. The series moves at a snappy pace, and is told chronologically, while intercutting between Tupac’s youth and Afeni’s. At the same time, it is far more thorough and far more sweeping than many other music documentaries, and especially those about stars as culturally significant as Tupac. Hughes sows his seeds carefully, telling a story of Black oppression and liberation, complex and occasionally fraught familial bonds, and a rapidly shifting US culture with such deftness that, when Tupac’s meteoric rise does begin, it feels less like a sudden ascent than an inevitable claiming of his birthright as the progeny of a radical activist.
Accordingly, Dear Mama is as much about Afeni as it is about Tupac, detailing her life as a firebrand political activist and revered organiser, her struggles with drug use, and tumultuous relationship with her son. A leader of the Harlem Black Panthers, Afeni was arrested and put in jail in the late 60s, a few years before Tupac’s birth, as part of the Panther 21, a group of Black Panthers accused of conspiring to carry out a terrorist attack. She later represented herself in court, despite no formal legal training, and was acquitted, exposing an FBI conspiracy to frame the Panthers as terrorists in the process.
Talking heads interviewed in Dear Mama, including Afeni’s sister Glo, draw constant parallels between Afeni and her son – their magnetism, their determination – and Hughes makes it abundantly clear that Tupac’s culturally disruptive art and celebrity could be traced directly back to Afeni’s radicalism. (“For the government there is nothing worse,” Tupac’s collaborator Chopmaster J says at one point, “than a revolutionary having a voice like cinema or records.”) Even so, Dear Mama is at its most fascinating when operating as a study of Afeni; I can imagine it working just as effectively if it were simply a five-hour study of her life and struggles.
Tupac has been dead for more than a quarter of a century – longer than he was alive. For a younger generation of fans, he can sometimes be seen as a Marilyn Monroe-type figure: a cultural icon whose image and tragic death are, perhaps, better known than the actual contours of his life. Hughes seems to be acutely aware of this and his series’ greatest triumph is a refusal to see Tupac simply as a symbol or cipher. Archival interviews with Tupac – at a correctional hearing, for example, or as a lively 17-year-old theatre kid clad in a singlet and ripped jeans – add layers of humanity and nuance to a figure who could sometimes feel elusive or invulnerable.
At the same time, Hughes shies away from hagiographic impulses; he doesn’t gloss over Tupac’s volatility or propensity for violence, for example, while still at pains to detail the protective impulses that led him to be that way. Other aspects of the rapper’s life, such as his queasy relationship with Death Row Records’ co-founder, Suge Knight, are treated with more ambiguity, which makes sense; Hughes is so meticulous in his analysis of Afeni and Tupac’s intertwined lives and struggles that it is clear he doesn’t feel the need to explain moments in time that have been more thoroughly documented.
Because of Hughes’s intense even-handedness, Dear Mama often feels remarkably sobering, even during the periods of Tupac’s adolescence when he seemed most at ease, or the parts of his career that were (relatively) free from disturbance. It is thorough and affecting, and occasionally exceedingly hard to watch. I can hardly imagine anyone viewing this series in one sitting, given it is so informationally dense and emotionally complex. Although the final moments are dedicated to the power of Tupac’s legacy, it is hardly the kind of feelgood, blemish-free music documentary that many viewers may expect; instead, it is a sharply defined portrait of two revolutionaries and their still-impactful lives.
• Dear Mama is on Disney+.
