Whatever else you can say about Nico Ballesteros’ fascinating and frustrating In Whose Name?, it doesn’t make too many excuses for the downfall of Kanye “Ye” West. Even when he’s on top of the world and playing the smashes from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he’s shown drunk and playfully brandishing a knife, and some of the first few celebrities in the film’s parade of enabling visitors are Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, P. Diddy, and Drake. When we take a trip back to 2018, to the beginning of West’s embrace of Trump, the first serious conversation on the mercurial rapper’s end is an attempt to reckon with both his mental health in the wake of quitting his medication for bipolar disorder, and how he risks bleeding out fans and Adidas deals if he keeps acting this way. We all know how this is going to end, but no one entirely did at the time — a testament to the risks of keeping your predictions preserved so that they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Ballesteros cut 3,000 hours of footage filmed starting in 2018 down to 100 minutes, but how someone who was 18 years old when he got this level of access managed to pull this off is arguably the main accomplishment here. West probably assumed that by virtue of being perpetually on camera anyway, one young person wouldn’t make a difference, but he also intermittently develops the self-awareness to treat this as an excuse to write his current testament, and Ballesteros lets the camera be dragged in whatever direction the West winds blow. This works to accomplish a certain kind of exhilaration, that is until around the time the film reaches 2020, at which point the material starts to shift from existing fully behind the scenes to reiterating some of the more famous moments of the Kanye news cycle, with Ballesteros recording in the background as they happen.
Is it Mekas or is it TMZ when a film is largely a shapeless tour through the subjectivity of West’s increasingly unstable mind? It’s undeniably powerful material: more salacious than insightful, but it’s also not like too many other musician documentaries. Kim Kardashian is a woman with plenty of agency, but her interactions with West make her seem more like Barbara Hutton. It certainly serves as a damning testament to how no one in the celebrity parade (except Swizz Beatz, seemingly the only moral figure) is willing to push back against someone who’s clearly delusional, incapable of staying on topic, and on a lot of nitrous oxide that’s destroying his brain, but also has too much money and influence to ever be told “no” and flips the fuck out on the rare occasions when he receives pushback. (Chris Rock somehow comes off worse than Elon Musk and Joel Osteen.) His rambling about how he’s trapped in a new form of slavery and the wordplay behind “masters” are a case of a blind squirrel finding a nut and not even knowing what to do with it.
West’s talents were already on the wane when this film’s production began in 2018, and whether that’s the reason for it or not, the making of the music is not particularly relevant here. (There admittedly wasn’t that much music being made for something like ye.) In Whose Name? is a film about a great artist with too much success and an avalanche of deep-seated issues who’s decided that everything he does needs to be performance art, and if you enter his orbit, you’re getting caught up for the ride. You can watch Ballesteros’ film for the cheap thrills of what it’s like to get caught up in the private life of a man who’s made it almost entirely public, and you might learn a thing or two. Still, one can’t help but get the impression that the titular question is a at least a partial reflection of Ballesteros himself trying to figure out what this film was even made for. Almost everyone in the world can get their kicks from whatever part of West‘s persona interests them and then disengage as needed, and In Whose Name? is the ultimate testament to that, right down to a concluding speech about how the film needs to avoid being an exercise in jumping from one antic to another. It fails pretty decisively at avoiding that, and knows it, but there’s also no documentation of a sociocultural phenomenon quite like it. Whether that’s down to West or Ballesteros is a question for the viewer to parse.
DIRECTOR: Nico Ballesteros; CAST: Kanye West; DISTRIBUTOR: AMSI Entertainment; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
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