Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell

BIGGIE: I GOT A STORY TO TELL is a documentary on the life and times of the iconic hip-hop artist. It features considerable home camera footage taken by his friend and collaborator Damion "D-Roc" Butler, showing Biggie and members of the Junior M.A.F.I.A. playing shows and hanging out in hotels on their rise to international stardom. Interspersed with this footage, we meet a young Christopher Wallace before he became Biggie Smalls/The Notorious B.I.G., and how trips to visit his mother's family in Jamaica inspired his art, as well as a jazz musician mentor who lived down the street and exposed him to the work of jazz drummer Max Roach. These influences helped to create Biggie's innovative game-changing style. The documentary also shows how Wallace and his friends learned to hustle on the mean streets near their Brooklyn neighborhood, selling crack and making money in the face of danger from the police and the gun violence around them. Against this backdrop, Wallace, who had been rapping since he was a tween, begins to learn the game, takes on rivals in other neighborhoods in epic rap battles, begins recording his own music, and starts to find success. Hit singles lead to multimillion-selling albums before his life was tragically cut short by unknown assailants who murdered him in Los Angeles in 1997, presumably in retaliation for the murder of Biggie's former friend and then rival Tupac Shakur.