Given its title (in case you didn’t catch it, it’s pronounced gen-ius) and its topic, you’d think jeen-yuhs: a Kanye trilogy would only consist of hero worship, forcing the audience to elate before Ye’s almighty shrine.

There’s certainly a good chunk of it in this three-part, 280-minute Netflix documentary, the first of which premiered online at the Sundance Film Festival. But there’s also, at least for half of its runtime, a fairly lucid and endearing portrayal of the artist as a young Yeezy trying to become a rap superstar. The fact that he didn’t do it easily, and almost didn’t do it at all, speaks more to his perseverance and unerring ego than to his talent, which is there from the start.

Directed by Chike Ozah and longtime West columnist Clarence “Coodie” Simmons, who has filmed the rapper on and off for two decades, jeen-yuhs offers a front-row look at what it takes to thrive in the unforgiving climate of hip-hop, and the burden it places on those at the top to stay relevant. If this were a biblical parable (let’s call it The Gospel According to Saint Pablo), then it would be about a gifted young man whose will to succeed was so prodigious that it ended up driving him mad. – madness taking the form of numerous forays onto the stage at the Grammy Awards, online and TV rants and a run for President of the United States in 2020.

This isn’t to poke fun at Kanye’s legitimate mental health issues, which Simmons, who recounts his own images as a friend and caring admirer, doesn’t shy away from. But when you see how much West pushed himself to be taken seriously as a rapper in his early days, how many doors were slammed in his face, and how, despite a car accident that broke his jaw at three places he managed to complete his first album knockout, University dropout, you realize that all of this can have an impact on your soul.

Divided into three 90-minute “acts” modestly titled “VISION”, “PURPOSE” and “AWAKENING”, the film mimics Yeezy’s career very well in that it is impressive, then almost exhilarating, then becomes exhausting and a little unbearable in its final version. sections. Clearly the best parts are the ones, set roughly between 2001 and 2004, where Simmons gained unlimited access to West, following the up-and-coming rap producer from Chicago to New York as he became a serious player in the game.

By then, Kanye had already exploded as the virtuoso young beatmaker behind half of Jay-Z’s 2001 classic album. The plan, plus tracks from East Coast mainstays like Scarface, Cam’ron, Taleb Kweli, Beanie Sigel, and Lil’ Kim. But he had bigger plans for himself than sitting in front of a mixing desk: he wanted to be the next Jay-Z.

The problem is that no one but Kanye – and his adoring and doting mother Donda, whose presence in the film provides a whiff of warmth and humor – believed in him. “You’re brilliant, but Jay-Z is a genius,” a friend tells him. “He really doesn’t fit the street image,” is another gripe we often hear, especially from the folks at Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records label, where Kanye is desperate to sign. .

There is perhaps no more revealing scene in all jeen-yuhs than that of “VISION” where Simmons follows the then 21-year-old West after he decides to plant Roc-A-Fella’s headquarters in Manhattan, going from office to office playing his demos as a solo artist. It’s a stunt that fails miserably, the record company is virtually indifferent to his music, and Kanye has no choice but to take back his CD and walk out defeated.

The scene is telling because it shows how he would stop at nothing to be heard – how humiliation wasn’t a word in his rhyme book. Fighting his way through the front, back and side doors of Roc-A-Fella not as a producer but as a legit MC, he finally got himself signed. In the two years that followed, the label delayed releasing his debut album, prompting Kanye to attempt even more stunts, including cutting a mouth-to-mouth track after the car accident, and self-funding his debut music video ( “Through the Wire,” directed by Simmons and Ozah. In 2004, Roc-A-Fella finally released University dropout universal acclaim (four times platinum, Grammy for Best Rap Album), sealing Ye’s reputation by the time “PURPOSE” was completed.

Then, the documentary traces a rather steady and unhappy journey from hip-hop superstar to donning a MAGA hat and raving about the evils of abortion. That’s partly because West pretty much cut Simmons out of his life after his early hits, working with directors better known for his videos and surrounding himself with what seems like an entourage of Ye-sayers, not to mention the Kardashians.

So while the film’s first two acts give us plenty of time in the studio to watch the jeen-yuhs at work, the highlight is a recording session with Jay-Z for his Plan 2 track “The Bounce”, on which Kanye receives a verse – we never see the making of breakthrough albums like 808 and heartache Where My beautiful dark twisted fantasy, where West took hip-hop to places it had never gone before.

The leap in the final act, “AWAKENING,” from rap phenom to drug-inflated music and fashion mogul isn’t always easy to take, and Simmons really is concerned enough about his former Chi-town pal. to come running with his HD Camera whenever he calls. Covering the period from 2005 to the present day, the latest episode traces Kanye’s various rises and falls via montage footage that fills in all the gaps, making it less compelling than the years when Simmons captured things firsthand.

After watching Yeezy’s many late-night antics, meltdowns, and embraces for Jesus as his savior, it’s hard to say exactly what pushed him over the edge at any given time, and the directors seem to be wrestling with that conundrum. The sudden death in 2007 of Donda, who was a major pillar in her son’s life, seems like a likely reason. Another may be the vast amount of self-confidence and creative chutzpah he needed to keep pushing his career further and higher: much like the mythical phoenix, Kanye seems to be constantly engulfed by his own flames, only to be reborn again and again.

This is certainly not the first time this has happened in the history of music or art, and geniuses like Mozart or Michelangelo – men to whom Ye has certainly compared himself – have had many ups and downs in their creative and private lives. The difference is that there was no one around to record everything, and in that sense jeen-yuhs sits alongside other recent bio-docs, such as that of Asif Kapadia Amy, which track a performer’s every move as they reach untold heights and then inevitably fall from favor.

Granted, not everyone will want to spend four and a half hours on Ye’s roller coaster, and if you don’t care about his musical sense, which is on full display here, then you probably shouldn’t tune in. But for hip-hop heads there’s a lot to embrace — the scene where West and Mos Def perform an impromptu duet is another highlight — provided you’re ready for all the ego-tripping.

Perhaps it’s best to heed what Yeezy says at the start of the film about one of his many ideas, in what feels like a fleeting moment of self-awareness: “It’s kind of narcissistic or whatever, but shit.”