Fortress of $olitude

on Diego Ongaro and Freddie Gibbs' 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘪𝘯𝘨

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Czesław Miłosz, Gift

WITH DMX GONE, Freddie Gibbs is my favorite rapper alive. It’s hard to overstate the effect Gibbs’ 21-track Str8 Killa No Filla compilation had on me in the summer of 2010, released in conjunction with the much shorter EP of similar name. Gibbs was 28, already aged according to an industry that evenly prizes precociousness and an ever-shifting idea of authenticity, and had already suffered being picked up and dropped by a major label (Interscope) after a botched affair with G-Unit¹. His split-flecked tales of drug dealing in his bombed-out hometown of Gary, Indiana (famously, the point of origin for the Jackson Family) stood in stark contrast to the ultraluxx stadium pop-rap dominating the charts at the time. The subject matter was striking, as was the matter-of-factness of his delivery, which sounded more like golden era gangsta rap² than many of the artists blaring from Brooklyn loudspeakers (Trey Songz, DJ Khaled, B.o.B featuring Bruno Mars, or Drake, releasing his debut album Thank Me Later) that summer. It’s no slight to say traditional mainstream success eluded Gibbs over the decade-plus that followed, but he was relentless, cultivating a steady following by working with fellow up-and-comers alongside respected artists closer to the alternative (or what used to be called “backpacker”) side of the business. This long-grinding approach has become the official Gibbs mythology: “A rapper comes out now and already has a Lamborghini,” he told Pitchfork last week. “I miss the story; I miss the struggle.”

Last summer - twelve years, nine studio albums, eight EPs, five mixtapes and one Grammy nomination since Str8 Killa - I sat down to watch Gibbs make his big-screen debut in French filmmaker Diego Ongaro’s Down With the King, at a screening at Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. By 2022 Gibbs was famous, if not megafamous - he had made it to the mountaintop. So what the hell was he doing acting in a no-budget indie film shot in the Berkshires? Costarring David Krumholtz - of 10 Things I Hate About You, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, et cetera - as his manager? After its premiere at Cannes 2021 (in the ACID, or Association du cinema indépendant, section) the movie went on to the Deauville Film Festival later the same summer, where it won a jury prize and garnered some rave reviews in the trade publications - but by the time of the Maysles screening Down With the King had no trailer, nor had there been any announcement of a distribution deal. I was quite literally afraid this would be my only chance to see it³. These long silences sometimes indicate that the film in question is un-sellable, yet is too far down the release pipeline to be properly buried; sometimes they augur even more convoluted problems further behind the scenes. My fears were unfounded. Even if it never received a theatrical release, Down With the King is in fact one of the best films of 2022.

Down With the King stars Gibbs as a rapper (this time, from Chicago) named Mercury “Money Merc” Maxwell, who retreats to a small farming town in Sandisfield, MA during a prolonged period of creative, professional and personal burnout. The movie opens and closes on scenes of Merc on the grounds outside a lavish townhouse, but it’s worth mentioning this log cabin mansion is essentially a glorified AirBnB for the musician who, we learn, faces steep financial troubles and mounting pressure to deliver a hot new album accordingly. Instead of recording a new magnum opus, Merc dodges FaceTime sessions with his increasingly frustrated entourage back in New York; he befriends a local woman (Jamie Neumann, of the television show Schitt’s Creek) who reveals to him that she’s a recovering opioid addict; he smokes weed with with a pig farmer named Bob, played by real-life pig farmer Bob Tarasuk⁴. The film is more neorealist mood piece than traditional three-act melodrama, but its main narrative hinge is Merc’s spontaneous decision to announce his retirement from music via Twitter, late one night after a few glasses of wine, completely blindsiding his team and manager Paul (Krumholtz).

Ongaro’s film was shot in October of 2020, but the screenplay never mentions coronavirus. Does that mean it takes place in an alternate universe? Not really - Down With the King does not require news-anchor voiceovers or references to infection rates back in the city to bear the imprint of quarantine. There’s isolation here, but also the unspoken melancholy of an inevitable return to “normalcy”, which ultimately means a job/world that can only be more fucked up than it was before. One of the few film critics to pay the movie any mind whatsoever, A.O. Scott was correct in diagnosing Down With the King as the first film about the “Great Resignation”; while its staying power is yet to be proven, this phrase became popular after the immediate shutdowns of the pandemic, their subsequent shocks to the American workplace and the “Where is my life going?” questions that followed. Ongaro’s film is a portrait of writer’s block, of existential dread and malaise; we don’t know why Merc’s sabbatical isn’t “working”, we are not spoonfed a reason, nor any idea what that would even look like.

It’s not unfair to say Down With the King is a movie punching above its weight. There is just one scene of Merc performing to an audience: a sold-out show at a Manhattan stadium. The filmmakers carefully frame Merc onstage with hazy, refracted lights, while the crowd below jumps up and down; these are intercut with a piece of stock footage suggesting tens of thousands of excited fans. If you watch it again (or in slow motion) you can clock the discrepancy, technically speaking - but it doesn’t matter much, because this is a film that uses its budgetary limits to make a pretty compelling case for narrative minimalism. At the Q&A following the Maysles screening, Ongaro stressed the importance of casting a real, professional rapper, as opposed to a star or actor playing one. In a Collider interview, Gibbs shone a little light on his heretofore attempts to break into acting:

I been trying to act probably just as long as I’ve been trying to rap. I just [had] never the opportunities for [the] way that I wanted. It was always hood movies, shit that I ain’t want to be in. No disrespect to nobody [that] do that type of shit, but I just didn’t want to be in that type of shit, I wanted to be in real avant-garde, artistic type of things… I had to quit being Freddie Gibbs for six months that I had to be Mercury. There’s a lot of flaws that I have as a human being and as a man that I added to him to give it a little more sense of reality.

Most films about musicians are biopics, or thinly veiled biopics in ill-fitting drag; condensing the drudgery of art-making into a linear narrative usually means boiling the creative process down to a cornball flash of inspiration behind the camera, in front of the canvas, or down in the recording studio, after which everything falls perfectly into place⁵. Down With the King features musician Leon Michels (of El Michels Affair) as one of Merc’s producers, but he’s effectively playing himself, and the end credits reveal that he produced most of the beats against which we see Merc workshopping new lyrics, with varying results. When you see Merc writing rhymes and brainstorming over the beats, there’s no easy catharsis, but it’s also not even clear he’s repeating himself - which Leon warns against - or failing to hit his usual marks. These are just brief snatches of a longer creative process with no easy dramaturgical in-or-out points. Despite being front and center in every scene of the film, Merc is granted a bit of distance and mystery by Ongaro’s camera; nothing is conclusive or definitive about these sessions. As when listening to his music, the midwestern, it-is-what-it-is-mayne flatness of Gibbs’ affect becomes the movie’s emotional baseline.

Even if the film suggests Merc is a megastar closer to the scale of Kanye or 50 Cent than a slow-simmered underdog sensation like Gibbs is in real life, it also challenges traditional images of hiphop, if not of celebrity at large; there are no groupies, piles of drugs or sportscars dotting the premises. Merc is alone for most of the film, contemplating next moves, playing on his phone or lost in a reverie. The ticking time bomb of his showbiz retirement doesn’t just mean change for him, but also ruins for his entourage. (Shades of Jay Z’s “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”, or the old NBA cliche that “Players don’t carry teams, planes do”.) The first time Paul appears in the flesh (versus as a face on Merc’s phone), he ambushes the rapper at his hideaway, and their blow-out argument carries the weight of untold years of compromises brokered and tongues bit on both sides. It’s also possible Merc simply doesn’t have the juice anymore, which would be a whole other register of tragedy for any artist working in any medium.