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Go in expecting the worst and you’ll be pleasantly surprised; if you go in expecting an epic film about one of the most prolific lyricist/poets of our generation you are going to be pissed. Notorious, the Notorious B.I.G. biopic directed by George Tillman Jr. and starring Jamal Woolard plays like a Lifetime movie on steroids or an underfed and feral version of Ray/Walk the Line. But by taking this film with a grain of salt, not only will you enjoy it more, but you can also appreciate its sparse shining moments.

The film’s beginning scenes are also its most interesting. These scenes focus on the un-mediated youth of Chris Wallace, the boy who would later become the Notorious B.I.G. We see a chubby, nerdy, vulnerable child who can’t stand up for himself, who is not exceptionally talented, who is not the media-inflated music mogul we all know. It is also at this young age that Chris seems most connected to the hip hop culture; before the money, glam, women, drugs, and ego we see shots of a young Chris reading Word Up magazine with Fab 5 Freddy on the cover, battling other MCs in the streets and listening to Rap Attack on a vintage boom box. We all know the story of his rise to fame, and moreover, what his fame looked like and how it ended: the film’s glosses over the strongest point of the story, which is where Chris came from. It is as if the film’s producers said, “OK, we need to hurry it up to the scenes where he’s wearing $10,000 dollar suits, hooking up with tons of naked women, smoking weed, riding in a limo or SUV and performing in front of thousands of people.” After the short clip of Chris’ adolescence, the film becomes much too typical, touching on hyper-mediated events all of us couldn’t forget if we tried: in essence the film becomes one long music video/documentary re-hash (think Dogtown and Z Boys VS Lords Of Dogtown); you start thinking, did the end of this film really need to be made?

Performances also make you question the decisions of director Tillman and the casting director. No doubt that any black woman, or woman for that matter, would want to have Angela Bassett portray her persona on screen, but (and I mean NO disrespect to Miss Wallace) Anglena Bassett looks about as close to Voletta Wallace as Tyra Banks does. To add further insult to injury, Bassett doesn’t even attempt Miss Wallace’s now legendary, severe and beautiful Jamaican accent (my Haitian friend in the audience was severely disappointed). The rest of the film’s casting, minus Woolard as Chris and Naturi Naughton as Lill Kim, are as equally confusing and disappointing. I heard audience members laugh out loud and turn to their friends asking “wait, that’s Puff Daddy?” While these details may seem important only to the uber hip hop nerd, they do add up and have gravity as generations will look back on this film as the memory of one of the most talented poets/rappers/musicians of our time. The obscure, sloppy, cliché picture that Notorious paints seems to be a somewhat inaccurate and dishonorable way to portray such a legend. It makes one wonder that in such a mediated age, what could a biopic film show us about a modern event or person that we haven’t seen over and over again in real life. It then seems that the film genres of biopic, at least for modern media figures are obsolete and redundant.