Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell

Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell (2021) is an Emmett Malloy documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It traces Christopher Wallace — a kid out of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn who became one of hip-hop's defining voices as The Notorious B.I.G.

Rather than recycle the gangster myth, the film follows the actual person. Home video, amateur footage from the block and the stage, and the voices of people who knew him before the fame: his mother Voletta Wallace, longtime friend and producer Sean Combs, and rappers from his circle like Lil' Cease and Lil' Kim. Out of those scraps comes the story of a teenager hustling on the corner while scribbling rhymes on the side, until he cut a record that flipped the East Coast.

The film leans on rare reels kept in the vault for years and on first-hand memory instead of a Wikipedia recap. It's calm and unexpectedly tender, skipping the usual sensational take on his death — most rewarding for anyone who grew up on Biggie and wants to know where that flow came from. Stream Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell (2021) online on iFILM.