Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
For a long-term (and long-form) documentary project to be successful, there are a few necessary ingredients needed to ensure that the metaphorical soufflé rises: Commitment, both on the subject’s part and the filmmakers’; access, which can get harder as one grows and circumstances change, and, most important of all, luck. There are only a handful of notable accomplishments to emerge from the Graveyard of Ideas, like Michael Apted’s Up series or Steve James’ Hoop Dreams, the latter which is cited by filmmakers Coodie and Chike Ozah as the primary influence on jeen-yuhs: a kanye trilogy, their own fascinating contribution to the genre, of which the first 88 minutes of their 250-minute odyssey screened at the festival this year. The pair — one behind the camera, the other an influential figure in the Chicago music scene — have spent the better part of the last two decades following Kanye West from his humble origins as a Chi-town producer through each and every artistic triumph, devastating tragedy, and wild development that he endured. Regardless of how one may personally feel about Ye, jeen-yuhs is worth seeking out simply for the amazing amount of historic — and I mean that when I say that — footage that the pair have picked up over the course of this partnership as well as the psychological depths it plumbs in seeking to show The Artist as a Man. Of course he would want final cut on a project like this: what’s on display here isn’t so much defamatory or incendiary, but it is most definitely revealing, piercing the eccentric veil that Ye has crafted for himself over his decades in the music industry.
Coodie, who met Ye at Jermaine Dupri’s birthday party on one night in 1998, is clearly enamored with the artist, much in the way that someone like Nick Carroway could only help but be drawn to someone like Jay Gatsby: It was clear to him, much earlier than anyone else, that this was an artist who could go on to do great things, and it was enough for him to try and commit to documenting his friend’s rise. By the time they’d met, Ye had already become a well-known figure in Chicago and had been working with nationally-recognized artists, but he was ready to start working on his own stuff. Yet he was trapped between worlds, being too peaceful for Roc-A-Fella (where he worked on tracks with Jay-Z’s The Blueprint) and too hardcore for Rawkus Records (where Ye lent his talents to Talib Kweli and Mos Def’s Black Star project), and had to hustle in order to get his shot. It is absolutely fantastic that the pair had the foresight to film something like Ye crashing the Roc-A-Fella offices in order to play the staffers the first version of “All Falls Down,” as he’s nearly laughed out of the building — not in a wholly disrespectful way because it’s clear that the dude was deeply respected in those halls — but his success as an individual artist was never guaranteed. Yet he never stopped hustling, grinding his way through production projects, improving his sound, making new connections, and trying to find the open windows when the door is slammed shut in his face. This first installment stresses just how massive of an undertaking this was, and how few and far in-between those rewards are: a pivotal scene hinges on Ye nearly breaking down in tears simply because he got a credit on a single release — and they managed to spell his name right.
As he moved from modest apartment to modest apartment (fridges stocked only with a drink or two in every one of them) in New Jersey and New York, Coodie and Ozah followed him, hoping to capture something that might be historic along the way — and perhaps rep the Chicago music scene in the process when the eyes of a then-relevant industry stalwart like MTV focused on one of its brightest stars. It must have been an unenviable task for the editors to sift through what seems to be a ton of footage in order to craft this narrative, but they’ve done a really solid job with this first installment. Occasionally they tug a bit too hard on the heartstrings: if one is even vaguely aware of Ye’s relationship with his mother, Donda, scenes of him talking to her about his ambitions and his childhood perhaps don’t need to be soundtracked by sad music, given that one already knows the importance of these moments. But beyond Coodie’s narration and the occasional drift into his own autobiography, we’re given unfiltered access to the growing mind of a masterful artist, wowing those he admired with his talent, feuding with his friends, buying porn from newsstands on the New York City streets and joking around with his friends and family.
It takes a certain kind of person to recognize his talent and advocate for himself as deeply as Ye did back then, and the end of this first installment sees him realize his dream and sign with a label, only to foreshadow the troubles — immediate and far-off — that would soon hit him, metaphorically and literally. It’ll be fascinating to see in the coming weeks whether or not the pair can pull off West’s transition to superstardom with the same amount of care that they gave him here, but color me excited to see where this ride goes.