There’s something about being an artist that few people teach you when pursuing that path: once you make it, your work – and more importantly, your life – is rarely your own, and it takes even more effort than the blood, sweat, and tears put into your art to assure some kind of privacy. It’s not uncommon for a performer to have a split persona between the person who goes out on stage and the individual writing the music and living their life behind closed doors. However, when the two intertwine and become difficult to separate from one another, things start to take a turn for the worse.
This unfortunate fate is one that bestowed rapper Gustav Ahr, aka Lil Peep, a nice, shy, quiet kid from Long Island who dealt with identity issues his whole life and who the real Ahr was, only to tragically pass away from a drug overdose at age 21. When he started making music under the name Lil Peep (taken from the nickname “Peep” that his mother used to have for him) – in this age of accessibility with SoundCloud, Instagram, and other platforms – he exploded in the underground. Many musical artists wanted to work with him. One music producer compared his blending of multiple styles to make something new and fresh (hip-hop, trap, emo, and rock) to Prince. That’s a massive burden on a talented artist under the age of 20, and that’s the heartbreaking truth that the documentary “Everybody’s Everything” holds at the center. When you’re perceived as everything to everyone, what is left for yourself?
Directors Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan put together an all-encompassing experience – comprised of Peep’s music, concert footage, home movies, and interviews with family, friends, past girlfriends, colleagues, and record executives – to paint a portrait about an immensely talented artist who blew up too big, too soon, and had difficulties reckoning with his sudden fame. It’s revealed that Ahr did not have a great relationship with his father, who was driven further away after splitting up with his mother. He did, however, have a good relationship with his grandfather, who wrote letters to Ahr. The film has a beautiful framework with the letters from his grandfather – read by him in voiceover – to perfectly articulate and capture the mindset of each section of the film. The film is produced by Terrence Malick, and using that structure – and cross-cutting between past and present during those voiceovers – is very much indebted to the acclaimed filmmaker’s style.
Jones and Silyan do an excellent job of looking at this story as objectively as possible, and recounting what people, unfortunately, saw as an inevitability. “If I said don’t do drugs, he could easily go a week without doing drugs. But if people were going hard, he would go harder for them,” mentioned his girlfriend. Peep’s pain shone through his music, but that hardship he was enduring gave way to emptiness when friends, colleagues, or admirers would consistently hover around him, sometimes resulting in them staying in his bed and Peep leaving to sleep in a walk-in closet. He would help pay for rent if friends were struggling, possibly unaware that any money spent on the label’s dime would have to be paid back. No one seemed truly malicious, but all these factors collided into a terrible downward spiral.
If there’s anything at fault in “Everybody’s Everything,” it’s that the film starts moving at a clip with an immersive soundscape and a sense of urgency to the storytelling from the interviews, but somewhere between the midsection and the film’s already-known tragic conclusion, that urgency dissipates. However, even during that time, the film remains captivating. Having only witnessed the quick meteoric rise of Lil Peep in the peripherals as it was unfolding, “Everybody’s Everything” is a loving tribute for fans as well as those unfamiliar. And for the latter, the doc truly creates a sense of humanity, awe, and undeniable raw talent that it makes it easy to why his music connected with so many people in such a quick amount time. But even someone who was so brilliant musically cannot be prepared for the external factors of the music industry attempting to bleed one dry. It’s truly sad, but also poignant and made with the utmost of love. [B+]