Biggie and Tupac

Reviewed by GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)

With this new film, British director/interviewer Nick Broomfield consolidates his style seen in Kurt and Courtney, a sometimes hilarious, occasionally oddball yet insightful doco about the life and times of Cobain, Love and their families and friends.

Broomfield appears an engagingly amateurish bumbler who sometimes gets visibly flustered, but like detective Colombo, he doesn't back down and just keeps coming back with one more question.

He also often finds the tangent of a story more interesting than his main theme and so wobbles off down side alleys (often literally) and meets people on the periphery of his story.

In the case of Kurt and Courtney that meant encounters with Love's wacko and vindictive dad, and one of her former boyfriends who delivered a menacing threat direct to camera.

It was, against the odds, surprisingly revealing, and ushered in a whole new style of documentary. Broomfield's style may be cheap (he lugs the sound gear himself, stays in fleabag motels) but not without value, and as an accidental detective following leads and loose ends he's second to none.

Biggie and Tupac is similar in conception (yep, his batteries run out minutes into a crucial interview) but he gets to the tangent straight away and, as before, it's a conspiracy theory.

For those who don't remember the events behind this blood-soaked story here it is: rappers Biggie Smalls (aka Notorious BIG) and Tupac Shakur were former friends who fell out, the rhetoric between East Coast/West Coast escalated, threats were made in lyrics and the media, Tupac was gunned down on the Vegas strip after a Mike Tyson fight in September '96. In March the following year Smalls was shot and killed outside the Peterson Museum in LA.

What attracts Broomfield is the suggestion of corruption within the LAPD (made by an officer investigating Biggie's murder) and a previously unexplored connection with Suge Knight's Death Row Records for whom many cops moonlighted as security.

Once that connection is in his sights Broomfield goes in search of police (past and present), friends of the two dead rappers, Biggie's charming and articulate mother, Voletta Wallace, "associates" and eventually an unscheduled interview with Knight in prison where he was serving time for a parole violation.

The theory is Knight hired people to hit Tupac because he was owed US$10 million by Death Row and was about to leave the label.

The Biggie killing was to throw investigators off the scent and create the notion of an East Coast/West Coast war. The man behind it all? The gargantuan Knight.

This is tough territory — the sign in Knight's cellblock reads "No warning shot required" — and there is a body count of the menacing Knight's associates and enemies.

Broomfield's style can be as frustrating as it is revealing. But as he stumbles in unannounced he often catches his subjects off-guard and they reveal more than they might otherwise. Knight seems bemused but lets drop a suggestion about Snoop Dogg that is terrifying.

Broomfield also pulls in some footage of the young Tupac and Biggie to place the story in the greater hip-hop context, and his pseudo-amateurism combined with the out-of-depth-Englishman guise seems to open doors often closed to more serious styles of film-making.

No definitive conclusion can be reached about the conspiracy, although there is a stench of collusion and a cover-up by the LAPD and Death Row.

But as with Kurt and Courtney the most interesting aspect is that you are dragged through a netherworld of marginal figures which adds context and colour to the main story, and are taken into their dangerous milieu by an informative if somewhat irritating doco style.

DVD (Imagine through Rhythmethod)

Director: Nick Broomfield