I wasn’t expecting to well up while watching a documentary about Kanye West. The embattled rapper has made some of the most thrilling, expansive albums in the genre and beyond, but around the time he aligned himself with Trump politically and the Kardashian set personally, the music took a turn for the turgid, while it seemed kinder to look away from the celebrity theatrics. Exhaustively scrutinising his tumultuous life and work over 20 years, the nearly five-hour Netflix project Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy is more moving than you might think.
Its directors, Coodie Simmons and Chike Ozah, have history with West, having directed his breakout videos for the singles Through the Wire and Jesus Walks, and the film benefits from their thick-and-thin perspective. Filming for Jeen-yuhs effectively started in 1998, with a plan to chronicle the then 21-year-old unknown’s rise through the circuit, from securing a record deal through to the recording of his gamechanging 2004 debut The College Dropout – his blazing creative process at the outset captured like lightning in a bottle. After a period of estrangement, they catch up with the vastly changed West in the present day, beset with mental health problems, a ruinously inflated celebrity ego and lingering grief over the death of his mother, Donda. It’s upsetting viewing, and all the more poignant for the flashes of mercurial brilliance that still glimmer through his erratic behaviour. Try as the documentary might to end on a note of hopeful closure, we sense West’s story has a few more acts to go.
