Many individuals, Individuals and foreigners alike, contemplate Florida essentially the most temperamental, divisive state within the union. It’s a place of sandy seashores, Disneyland, gators and area shuttle launches. It has large communities of immigrants and retirees, and wild disparities between the wealthy and the poor. It’s, briefly, precisely the form of place you’d count on Louis Theroux to move.
Theroux’s model of investigative documentary filmmaking works greatest on this crucible of opposing forces. Right here in a programme titled Rap’s New Frontline, Theroux challenges the narratives round gun crime and medicines as they intersect with Florida’s rap scene. It’s the excellent topic for Theroux, who made his identify with Bizarre Weekends and is all the time most at house when the topic has a touch of farce. His documentaries have at occasions struggled to toe that line, grappling with overly bleak material (comparable to LA Tales: Fringe of Life, taking a look at essential care in a Los Angeles hospital) or lack of entry, which hamstrung his function movie, My Scientology Film.
Forbidden America is a perfect synthesis of the issues that make Theroux an awesome documentarian. His topics have sufficient media savvy to wish to speak to him, however not sufficient to know when to maintain quiet (“I can’t say whether or not it was or not,” lure artist LPB Poody tells Theroux when quizzed on a deadly diss observe, “however… undoubtedly”). They’re bigger than life characters, starting from the Cuban-American “Soundcloud” MC Broke Child (who gives one of many nice sizzling mic moments since The Jinx or Gordon Brown), to the plaintive, imprisoned rapper Foogiano, and the acclaimed lure artist Hotboii, who appears genuinely disarmed by Theroux’s interrogative type.
And that type is the important thing. Folks somewhat banally declare that Theroux gives his interviewees simply sufficient rope to hold themselves, however that’s an evaluation that somewhat ignores his evolution as a documentarian. He’s truly extraordinarily direct, however with an unexcitable receptivity that, crucially, makes his topics really feel heard. It’s a far cry from the awkward, mumbling and bumbling Theroux of his early documentaries; in truth, he exudes confidence now. Perhaps being a 6ft 2in wealthy white man gives some help. However, regardless of the cause, the sense of Theroux being a naïf thrown out of his depth is lengthy gone.
Maybe Rap’s New Frontline’s most interesting second comes when Theroux sits right down to interview the rapper 9lokkNine, alongside his attorneys (he’s going through an tried homicide cost). It deftly encapsulates the strain between the seriousness of the problems confronted (gun crime, gang violence, drug abuse) and the hysterical – nearly satirically so – pitch that it’s all offered at. The juxtaposition is introduced into sharpest aid as Theroux takes “Glock” to activity on the lyrics to his track “Crayola”, which the rapper insists is about, nicely, crayons. “You probably did a rap track about crayons?” Theroux asks, incredulously. “You blew up with a rap track that was about colouring?” The change is laugh-out-loud humorous, an instance of the present’s deadly unseriousness. One minute later they’re watching CCTV of the drive-by capturing, the explanation Glock has been in jail and why his attorneys are within the room.
This new Theroux has a gravity that makes him impervious to embarrassment. The place beforehand his somewhat shameful nerdiness was the supply of the humour (and he does on this, as soon as once more, ship a brief rap) the joke is now that he’s unapologetic about being a middle-class father of three. At one level he asks N.F.L Von, a rapper below home arrest, why he carries a lot money on him, and doesn’t put it right into a financial institution. “What if somebody scams me?” Von replies. “Properly, you’ve acquired to have a look at what the charges of curiosity are,” Theroux deadpans again. For all of the braggadocio that he encounters, it’s his topics who find yourself contorting themselves to his persona: the outcomes are concurrently stunning and hilarious.