Sundance Review: jeen-yuhs Paints a Humanizing Portrait of Kanye West’s Beginnings
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The post Sundance Review: jeen-yuhs Paints a Humanizing Portrait of Kanye West’s Beginnings appeared first on Consequence.
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
The Pitch: Before his marriage to (and subsequent divorce from) Kim Kardashian, before his abortive 2020 presidential campaign, before the wild tweets and outrageous behavior that would define his public persona in the 2020s, there was just Kanye West and the music. From the beginning, the Atlanta-born, Chicago-raised producer turned rapper knew he was going to be one of the greatest musicians of all time; his first album, 2004’s The College Dropout, is studded with lines to that effect (“I was born to be different”).
But it took the world a while to catch up with his ambition, and the problems didn’t stop there even after he finally broke through. By his side for the last twenty years was Clarence “Coodie” Simmons, a comedian turned filmmaker who quickly saw something in the 21-year-old West and started following him around with a video camera for the next two decades, eventually involving his “Through the Wire” music video co-director Chike Ozah.
The results add up to jeen-yuhs, a three-part epic docuseries styled after Hoop Dreams, another lengthy fly-on-the-wall account of poor Black Chicagoans trying to make a name for themselves. Unlike the young basketball hopefuls of Steve James’ opus, however, West actually made it, and it’s that rise to fame that Coodie & Chike chronicle in exhaustive depth.
Part I: Vision: As of this writing, only Part I of the doc — subtitled vision — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, with the other two parts being made available when the whole thing comes to Netflix later this month. But even in this first hour and a half, Coodie & Chike have painted a staggering blast-from-the-past account of West’s origins, offering a glimpse of the man in his pre-fame stages of ambition.
Drawing from reams of archival footage, mostly fly-on-the-wall B-roll Coodie took while he hung around with West in recording studios, record label offices, and on the streets of Chicago, jeen-yuhs is remarkable in its ability to humanize a man who’s long since dehumanized himself with his self-made comparisons to Jesus Christ and bizarre diss tracks about Pete Davidson.
It’s also interspersed by lilting, sleepy narration from Coodie himself, inserting his own perspective into the narrative as a far-from-impartial observer. It’s admittedly a bit distracting, reading as an attempt to conflate Kanye’s success with his own; there’s a feeling that, somewhere in this lengthy narrative fabric, he wants to position himself as the film’s co-lead rather than one of its authors.
When the film veers into Coodie’s particular asides, it loses focus: one gets the impression we’re leading up to a presumed fallout between filmmaker and subject once West makes good. (This is the trouble with only reviewing one-third of a documentary: seeds are sown that may be reaped in future installments.)
Portrait of Yeezus as a Young Man: But until then, Coodie and Chike’s camera lingers on West in vision‘s chronicle of his attempts to break out from his typecasting as a beats man for everyone from Mos Def to Jay-Z to an MC in his own right. It’s downright humbling to see West’s signature brio having to face people who don’t know (or care) who he is yet: Imagine Kanye West walking into a record label’s offices, playing “All Falls Down” for one record exec and another while rapping along, to stunned, uncomfortable silence.
As a backpack rapper who didn’t cater to the gangsta rap sensibilities that were popular at the time, record execs didn’t find him marketable, no matter how expert his bars might be. One white staffer at Roc-A-Fella Records calls him “Cayenne” by mistake; later, he jokes about a mislabeled lineup that leaves out his surname (“Chicago’s very own Ye,” he jokes, maybe coming up with his eventual pseudonym right then and there.) It’s worth noting that we barely get any of Kanye’s actual music in the soundtrack itself, what little we hear being diegetic: Its nature as an unauthorized account likely extends to the music rights.
Donda: But amid these setbacks, West still feels grounded, human, and relatable, his bluster feeling like a consequence of the fronting that needs to happen in order to be heard in the hip-hop world in the first place. A big part of this is the lengthy time the first hour spends with West and his radiant mother, Donda, whose presence turns West into a sweet little kid all over again.
Her influence on his life and artistry has been apparent from the start (his most recent album bears her name, after all), and in this footage it’s easy to see why. She’s warm, kind, endlessly supportive: during a visit to West’s childhood home on the South Side, the two reminisce about the good old days, and their love for each other is infectious.
Donda’s passing in 2007 was clearly a turning point for West as an artist and a person, and not necessarily for the better: visions tragically reminds us of the centering pull Donda had on him.
The Verdict: It’s tough to gauge the overall effect of the docuseries from only one-third of the picture — one gets the impression we’re only at the beginning of Coodie & Chike’s accounts of Kanye’s life as an artist. (Recent headlines indicate West is nervous about the final product, insisting on “final edit and approval” for a film that seemingly prides itself on not having the endorsement of its subject.)
But if Visions is anything to go by, jeen-yuhs excels as a profile of an embryonic artist whose flight towards the sun just hasn’t burned his wings yet. Seeing the petty, unstable raconteur West has become, and the bizarre antics that have defined his place in the pop-culture milieu, it’s hard not to watch jeen-yuhs and want the old Kanye back — the hungry artist who hasn’t proven himself yet, which keeps his two feet somewhat on the ground.
Where to Watch: All three parts of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy come to Netflix on February 16th.
Trailer:
Sundance Review: jeen-yuhs Paints a Humanizing Portrait of Kanye West’s Beginnings
Clint Worthington
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