Everybody's Everything

MOVIE #1,285 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 12.19.23 As a 67-year-old man, I’m fascinated by certain forms of ‘new’ music that I don’t quite understand and probably don’t have the capacity to. This inclination led me to watching the Yung Lean documentary a couple years ago, and now this film about Lil Peep, the face-tatted rapper-singer from Long Island who died tragically at 21 from a drug overdose. It’s difficult to gauge Peep’s popularity — his posthumous LP debuted at #4 on Billboard — but he’s best viewed as an artist who, while his fanbase wasn’t massive in the Swiftian sense, had a devout young following that were obsessed with him. While this music isn’t for me, I don’t hate it, and as a movie it’s a successful portrait of the individual, born Gustav Åhr, taking the good with the obviously very bad. It’s framed by the narration of letters written to Gus by his grandfather, Jack Womack, a noted Harvard professor and author. And it’s Womack’s voice we hear throughout.

The decision to hold back his on-camera interview until the conclusion is a strong one, as we get to live with his wonderful grandpa voice before seeing it come alive in all its anguish and grief.

Now that I’m old, the youth scares me. And films like this make me realize that they’ve always scared me, even when I was young. But with documents like this comes an understanding, albeit a fractured one, just out of reach. I’m still scared but I understand the fear a little bit better.

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Everybody's Everything is a 2019 documentary film about the life of Gustav Elijah Åhr, the American rapper, singer, and songwriter known professionally as Lil Peep. The film was directed by Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan, produced by Benjamin Soley and executive produced by Terrence Malick, Liza Womack and Sarah Stennett. It chronicles the life of Lil Peep from his childhood in Long Beach, NY through his meteoric rise in the underground scene and music industry, up to his death on November 15, 2017 at the age of 21. The film takes its title from one of Lil Peep's Instagram posts, which appeared the day before his death. “I just wanna be everybody's everything," he wrote. The documentary is described as a "humanistic portrait that seeks to understand an artist who attempted to be all things to all people." It was released on March 10, 2019.