jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy

"jeen-yuhs" is a vital document on how we got this far.

jeen-yuhs Act 1 clearly only scratches the surface, with a lot more to come from Kanye's life, including the tragic death of his mother in 2007, and some of the more controversial parts of his life (no doubt the MAGA hat will make an appearance), but stick with it, because this documentary really does set the precedent for all future biographies.

After almost five hours that flew by like one and could have held my attention for 10 more just like them, “jeen-yuhs” left me less curious about how we might be able to escape from Kanye West than it did about how Kanye West might be able to escape from himself.

Is your preferred archetype of Kanye the hungry, deeply focused, self-made scrapper who showed everybody? Or the openly bipolar billionaire whose run for president felt more like a box to check on a list of Ultimate Hubris moments than anything even half-seriously intended? Both Kanyes are on view in “Jeen-yuhs,” with a story that necessarily comes off deeply bifurcated, given that a plot is something West would seem to have lost along the way. But what a Horatio Alger story it is.

Overall, Jeen-Yuhs succeeds in elucidating Kanye’s journey to stardom, though ultimately its intimacy feels professional rather than personal. The documentary is valuable to audience members who want to know more of the details behind the stories he tells on the last track of The College Dropout, “Last Call,” and learn more about his close relationship with his mother. For fans, listeners, and viewers who want insight into the last half-decade of Kanye’s public mishaps, there’s a little there, but not a lot.

“Jeen-Yuhs” is a compassionate record of the journey.

Extremely watchable, unfiltered trilogy (of which two episodes were available for review) is as much about the power of turbo-charged self-belief as it is about genius.

On one level, all of this amounts to a heartwarming tale of persistence, struggle against the odds and justified self-belief.

The opening act, titled “Vision”, will have you feeling all manner of things towards Kanye West – most of them good.

Whether this documentary series unfolds as triumph or tragedy, it is already succeeding in providing a richly nuanced picture of one of the great talents of our times.

Simmons clearly lionizes his old friend, and while we see flashes of Ye’s legendary temper and mercurial nature, what comes across most impressively is the handheld portrait of a young artist refusing to give up his dreams or accept a certain level of success or to be labeled by, well, his label.

If Visions is anything to go by, jeen-yuhs excels as a profile of an embryonic artist whose flight towards the sun just hasn’t burned his wings yet.

This [third] episode is less narratively satisfying and coherent than the first two, but Simmons’s indiscriminate eye and his pre-existing comfort with West end up as assets.