Critic Reviews

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.

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

Jeen-yuhs is an exceptional, engrossing documentary that peels back the accumulated layers of Kanye West’s career and celebrity, revealing the hungry creative at his core.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.