There are many things that can be said about Biggie Smalls, the rapper officially known as the Notorious B.I.G., who was gunned down in a hail of bullets on Wilshire Boulevard in 1997 when he was just 24. But the one that fits best on his massive frame is a slight one: flow.
Flow was there in his rhymes, a hypnotic seduction of words weaving and teasing around you like the perpetual haze trailing from his blunts. It was there in the deep rumble of his voice, in the slow, liquid roll of his body as he moved. And it is there in Jamal Woolard, the young rapper who plays him in "Notorious," a performance that goes a long way toward saving a movie that has fallen obsessively in love with its subject.
Mad, blind love is always a hazard in films that fashion themselves as biographies. No detail of a life too small, no moment left behind. In "Notorious," director George Tillman Jr. and screenwriters Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker have fallen right into the pit alongside so many who have come before them.
The sheer weight of all the bits and pieces of Biggie's journey from the drug-soaked ghetto of his Bed-Stuy boyhood to artistic rap powerhouse and finally to the deadly streets of his newly minted manhood threaten at times to drown the film. But then Woolard's chocolate pudding cheeks -- he packed 30 pounds onto his already sizable body to play Biggie -- will break into a smile that makes you want to stay a little longer. It was a look the rapper used with all the women in his life when trying to escape his latest indiscretion, until, as it does in the film, it starts to lose its power.
"Notorious" begins at the end. Biggie has come to Los Angeles as a man and a metaphor -- attempting to diffuse and defy the East Coast/West Coast rap war that had been spraying bullets across the country and into bodies of the genre's angry artists for years. In a world where the industry heavyweights are record labels called Bad Boy and Death Row, and the music is like a corner crack house -- dirty, dark and lethal -- maybe that was the way the story was destined to unfold.
Six months earlier, another rap legend, 25-year-old Tupac Shakur, was gunned down in Las Vegas, and the afterburn of that killing was still white-hot. Death threats were choking Biggie's cell as he left the Vibe magazine party after the Soul Train Music Awards that night.
