A Notorious clich퀌�

The new Notorious B.I.G. biopic, Notorious is a lot like snorting coke off a stripper’s ass.*
At first, it feels pretty good, like it’s the best decision you’ve ever made. Then it’s over, and you realize what you’ve become: a living, breathing, herpes-infested cliché. Also, you feel slightly, er, dirty.

I mean, Notorious literally hits on every single trope of the musician origin story: the zoom to Billboard numbers, the cavalcade of magazine covers, the annoying tick of setting up the lyrics to famous songs by forcing them into inane dialogue.

It’s just too much. And here’s the thing: If you’re going to make a movie about a rapper’s recent highly publicized life, give us something new or revealing. Even a cursory Biggie fan will not be surprised by a single scene.

For those not in the know, Biggie’s story is something of hip-hop archetype. Born Christopher Wallace, he grew up fatherless in a poor Brooklyn neighborhood, started dealing drugs in his teens to prove his manhood, started rhyming on the street corner to pass the time and, after a stint in jail and one too many close calls, decided to pursue music as a path out of poverty.

His first and best album was 1994’s Ready To Die, and it became a milestone of East Coast rap; telling stories from the streets with a booming baritone and clever wordplay atop dirty, dusty beats. The album’s success launched the monster known as Puff Daddy, and the various artists on his Bad Boy label, including former Biggie-squeeze Lil’ Kim.

Besides the autobiographical details, Notorious is mainly concerned with the two portions of Biggie’s life that are the most obviously dramatic (and the most widely reported): his feud with Tupac and his unsure relationship with women, notably singer Faith Evans, his wife.

The much-debated East-West feud, of which Biggie and Tupac were the center, gets a lot of time in the film. And this makes sense, as both rappers were shot dead, probably because of the drama. Predictably, because he was the film’s Executive Producer, Puffy and crew come off looking like saints, while Tupac and Death Row seem like creeps (a fair characterization of Suge Knight, to be sure).

In real life, it wasn’t that simple. Both sides goosed the blood war to boost album sales and publicity, and neither backed down until two great hip-hop talents were dead.

Which gets at another problem in the film: the Jesus-ification of Biggie.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s sad that he died at 25, but he was decidedly not a perfect person. Even as Notorious shows him selling crack to a pregnant woman, cheating on his wife and ignoring his children, his imperfections are glossed over and ignored.

But the only interesting thing about Biggie is his dichotomies, his effortless charm in the face of being, really, not all that great a person. The movie mostly ignores this.

Newcomer Jamal Woolard, who ably plays the main character, saves Notorious from complete awfulness with a warm, near-perfect performance. A rapper himself, Woolard nails the mannerisms and voice of the rap legend. And in the interest of showing just how good Woolward is, the other actors playing rappers in the film kindly botch their performances.

Derek Luke is annoying as Puff Daddy (but not in the way that Puff Daddy is actually annoying) and the actor who plays Tupac, Anthony Mackie, plays him as a deranged idiot. Tupac was a lot of things, maybe even deranged, but he was not an idiot.

What this movie needed to be, instead of a standard biopic, was an exploration of hip-hop martyrdom. Too often, fans of the genre deify their heroes after they die. This is self-destructive and fundamentally dishonest. We need to come to terms with the imperfections of our heroes, and learn from them.

Going down in blaze of glory because you lost control of your own persona is not commendable, it’s terrible. And Notorious doesn’t even touch the subtleties of this idea. So here’s another, final, tragedy of Biggie Smalls’ legacy: the simplification of a complicated life, and another example of a failed biopic.

[*Full disclosure: this is not something I’ve ever done. Stripper’s asses have far better uses. Also, I’m pretty sure no one has actually done this, ever. Like unicorns and elves, everyone writes about it, but it’s definitely not real.]