We see prophetic footage of a young Gus saying, “I wanna do the microphone.” As a toddler, when instructed not to touch something, he responds, “I touched!” Near the end we see a childhood photo of him dressed up as Peter Pan.
#Lil peep documentary movie
What the movie conveys beautifully is Peep’s personality: his charisma, his depression, his playfulness, his intense desire to be inclusive, sometimes to his detriment. He’s framed as this boogeyman responsible for so much of the suffering that haunted and eventually destroyed his son, but we don’t learn whether his alleged mistreatment went beyond neglect into more overt forms of abuse. I don’t know whether the filmmakers sought to interview Karl Åhr or if he’d have even been willing to speak, but the lack of his perspective or details about his negative relationship with Peep is one of the most glaring blemishes on the movie. At another, his manager, Chase Ortega, describes a conversation where Peep seemed reluctant to discuss his father. At one point Peep’s mom describes his father as a guy who coached his kids’ sports teams but wasn’t much involved beyond that.
Echoing their comments from other interviews, in the movie Peep and his mom allude to some kind of damage inflicted by his father, but we’re never given any specifics, and we don’t see him except occasionally in the abundant footage of Peep’s childhood. Missing is Peep’s dad, Karl Åhr, with whom he maintained no relationship after his parents divorced in his 10th-grade year. His voice is heard throughout the film narrating his letters to young Gus, a device used as connective tissue. It ends with an extended sitdown with his grandfather and surrogate father figure, retired Harvard history professor Jack Womack. Both women are interviewed extensively in the film, as are Peep’s manager, two of his girlfriends, and a wide cast of friends and collaborators. Malick, the legendary auteur whose attachment to Everybody’s Everything raised eyebrows and expectations, produced the project along with Peep’s mother, Liza Womack, and his agent, Sarah Stennett. Which is about how I feel about the Lil Peep documentary I screened at SXSW this week.Įverybody’s Everything was directed by Ramez Silyan, a music video director who did Peep’s “Girls” video, and Sebastian Jones, a filmmaker who worked as an associate producer on Terrence Malick’s Austin music scene drama Song To Song. I found it flawed but ultimately captivating and compulsively watchable. Montage Of Heck was a radically intimate portrait built from Cobain’s own archives, and some viewed its depiction of his decrepit junkie home life with Courtney Love as invasive and exploitative. One more: Four years ago I got a window into Cobain’s life by watching Brett Morgen’s Montage Of Heck documentary at SXSW. I laughed him off as a trashy annoyance and scoffed when Pitchfork called him “ the future of emo.” And when he was gone in a flash, I was one of many detractors who had to reevaluate my relationship to his music, ultimately concluding that my biases had blinded me from approaching Peep’s music on its merits. In Cobain’s case I was too young and sheltered although I lived through Nirvana’s rise, I never heard of Cobain until kids started showing up at my elementary school wearing T-shirts commemorating his death. I didn’t properly appreciate either artist while they were still alive. I also have subjective, personal reasons for aligning Peep with Cobain.
He rapped and sang about wanting to kill himself, and through drug abuse, he achieved it. 1, the face-tatted, formerly homeless rising star told the Times of London, “I’d love to be the new Kurt Cobain.” His 2016 breakthrough mixtape Hellboy included a song called “Cobain.” He leaned into the comparison, sometimes in reckless and destructive ways. Three months earlier, upon the release of his debut album Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt.
Peep, born Gustav Åhr, drew the parallel himself even before he died from a fentanyl overdose in November 2017 at the incomprehensibly young age of 21. Both rapidly became generational icons, a reverence that became more like deification when each one died young in tragic fashion. Both styled themselves as outsiders despite a personal and artistic magnetism that pulled the masses in their direction. Both coped with depression by abusing hard drugs. Both funneled their trauma and talent into revolutionary, contagiously influential new musical forms. Both were devastated by their parents’ divorces. Both were strikingly handsome young musical prodigies. Objectively, there are many similarities. When I think about Lil Peep, it’s hard not to think about Kurt Cobain.
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