The Lil Peep Documentary Tells a Familiar Story, but That Doesn’t Make It Less Sad

There’s a moment just over halfway through Everybody’s Everything, the new documentary about the late Lil Peep, when the nascent pop-punk/rap star takes on a trope we’ve seen many times before: the musician too fucked up to perform. In this version of that well-worn tale, Peep is at the end of a tour, and he’s ingested an ungodly amount of whatever he can get his hands on. It’s May 2017; he’s just a few months removed from several big-time feature stories that will elevate him from underground iconoclast to buzzy mainstream outsider. He’s also just six months away from his death by accidental overdose. But on this night, he’s just a kid who can’t go on stage in his adopted home of Los Angeles.

“We’re in the stairwell, and it’s just Peep and I,” says his entertainment lawyer Josh Binder, recounting the incident in the doc. “Peep looks at me and he goes, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’” His team considers canceling the show or calling the fire department to shut down the venue. But eventually, Peep takes the stage. It starts ugly: He mumbles through his opener, skipping whole bars at a time as one of his managers uses a fog machine as a distraction. There’s a trash can ready in case he needs to puke. The song ends, and the crowd tepidly applauds. In this moment, he’s less Next Big Thing than a 20-year-old who just needs help. What happens next shouldn’t surprise you if you’ve seen this story before: Peep snaps out of it and proceeds to kill the rest of his set, wowing the record execs in attendance and further solidifying himself as a rising star. “I go upstairs to say hello to him, and he goes, ‘I told you I could do it,’” Binder says. “At that moment, I was like, ‘We’ve got a problem.’”

That problem is explored throughout Everybody’s Everything, released in select theaters this week and accompanied by a new album of Peep material due Friday. Executive produced by Terrence Malick and scored by Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, the documentary is an at-times gripping portrait of an artist on the cusp of something great who saw his flame snuffed out too soon. It’s at once a uniquely late-2010s story—the genre-bending, face-tatted singer gets famous on social media and SoundCloud for his songs about depression and drug abuse—and one we’ve heard countless times before, of enablers in an uncaring music industry who can’t see they’re helping destroy the person they’re propping up. But just because you know this song doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking. In fact, it may make it more so.

For all the hand-wringing over Lil Peep’s music and death, it’s easy to forget just how brief his life was—and how briefly he was in the public light before he died. Born Gustav Ahr in 1996, he never fit into the community of his native Long Island growing up. As his family and friends tell Everybody’s Everything directors Ramez Silyan and Sebastian Jones, his peers took summer lifeguard jobs and applied to fancy schools. Peep, the product of a broken home who felt abandoned by his father, instead dropped out of high school to focus on music, weed, and an ever-growing collection of tattoos, including a few on his face that he says he got because what’s a job-stopper when you don’t plan to have a job?

He began recording charmingly lo-fi music under the charmingly terrible name “Trap Goose.” He eventually abandoned that moniker some time around 2015 to go with Lil Peep, a pet name his mother, Liza Womack, gave him as a baby because of his big eyes and angelic looks. His early songs—a self-recorded mix of trap and sing-song AutoTune that sampled early Modest Mouse, Postal Service, and alt-Christian grunge kids Flyleaf—were all loaded to SoundCloud with the tag #AlternativeRock. Some got low-budget videos he made using a dark bed sheet for a green screen. Not all were great, but his combination of pop-punk and rap sensibilities with lyrics about drugs and inner darkness tapped into something unique, at the intersection of Future and My Chemical Romance. The sound was distinctly his but it also predicted the direction of mainstream music. By the time he made “Star Shopping,” an early fan favorite that currently has more than 100 million plays on SoundCloud, people were beginning to notice, and Peep was beginning to believe he could make something out of his craft.

From there, Peep’s story gets muddy. Everybody’s Everything recounts him falling in with and then out of one crew, Schemaposse, and latching on in 2016 with another, Gothboiclique, which he may have been on the verge of leaving before he died. He lands in California and gets his infamous “Cry Baby” ink from a cop who does kitchen tattoos on the side. He finds himself homeless, sells a song called “Mud on My Gucci” to cover the deposit on a Skid Row loft, and moves in with a few of his collaborators; the apartment becomes a 24/7 party and/or waking nightmare. Managers are introduced. Peep signs a contract with a 360 company named First Access, which wants to elevate him to stadium status. He appears in magazines. He sells out shows in Russia. At some point, Juicy J shows up. As do characters named “Fish Narc” and “Slug Christ.” There’s an ever-increasing amount of drugs. Backstage, he snorts a line seconds after saying he has a bloody nose. It’s all a blur. By the time he’s walking runways in Milan, we’re just a short time removed from him recording songs in his mother’s house.

Everybody’s Everything paints the picture of a sweet, insecure young kid who’s able to pull whomever he meets into his orbit through sheer charisma and talent, almost accidentally. Underneath his frayed pink hair and face tattoos, he’s naturally handsome, and despite his disaffected on-record persona, he’s quite funny and charming. He’s supremely talented—at one point in the doc, a record producer compares his ability to blend genres to Prince’s, and you’re not totally unconvinced. He’s also beyond generous, perhaps by lineage: Peep was the grandson of John Womack Jr., a historian of Marxism and the Mexican Revolution who was the strongest paternal figure in Gus’s life after his parents divorced; Peep tells his mother he wants to destroy capitalism in the music industry. (This comes, albeit, after he buys a diamond-encrusted chain.) He backs up that talk by giving away his money, letting his friends live in his house, and even paying Fish Narc’s rent.

All of this brings a cabal of people who smell opportunity, from the Schemaposse founder who DMs Peep “We’re going to blow you up” before even introducing himself, to the managers who ignore his wishes to raise Gothboiclique’s profile alongside his, to the friends who are all too eager to max out his credit cards and wear his clothes. Maybe Peep, who never fit in back East and resents his absentee dad, is trying to fill a void. Maybe he’s just kind. (The “DADDY” tattoo on his chest would seem to indicate the former.) Either way, he’s trying to be all things to all people even as it takes a toll on him. “He was anxious about not being able to be enough for everyone,” Fish Narc says. “Everyone just wanted so much from him.”

None of this—the drugs, the sad-clown musician masking past trauma, the sycophants—is new nor inherently profound. The annals of rock history are littered with stars we watched combust with a mix of concern and intrigue. But Lil Peep’s story is new for everyone involved in it. And for his generation, his story is more wrenching, more relevant, than any of the supernovas that came before him.

Lil Peep is sometimes compared to Kurt Cobain, another handsome, grungy star with drug problems who died too young. It’s a comparison that Peep cultivated (he publicly mused about the idea and released a song in 2016 named after the Nirvana frontman) but it’s an imperfect one: Kurt’s band was an inescapable presence in the early ’90s credited with revolutionizing rock ’n’ roll; Peep was a niche artist who could have been on the precipice of something similar, but he never reached those heights. Strip away influence and chart numbers, however, and there’s one key similarity they share: their status as an avatar for their generations. For Cobain, that meant speaking for the supposedly apathetic, slacking Gen Xers waiting for something better. For Peep, it was serving as a stand-in for a cohort that has normalized depression and anxiety and has never known a world that wasn’t extremely online.

If Everybody’s Everything undersells any part of Peep’s life, it’s his connection to that idea. The film seldom references the larger world happening outside of his, such as the loosely linked SoundCloud rap movement that he was associated with or the fans who heard their pain reflected in his songs. Silyan and Jones aren’t trying to make a martyr of Peep; they’re trying to properly eulogize him. The result is a deeply personal story that still has many of the rock star beats we’ve become intimately familiar with.

There’s one aspect to this story, however, that places Peep’s version firmly in the present day and makes it all the more tragic: the ubiquity of social media. Before he died, he accumulated more than 2 million Instagram followers, to whom he’d regularly broadcast himself blowing lines of cocaine, or drinking, or just generally fucking around. It’s similar to how he had distributed most of his music: uploaded directly, removing any buffer between him and his fans. That was the case in good times and in bad. November 14, 2017, was one of the bad times: Peep got upset about a show in El Paso he was about to perform, went live on Instagram, and ingested a copious amount of Xanax. He followed that up with a post whose caption gave Everybody’s Everything its title.

The next day, Peep was in Tucson, Arizona, where he was set to play one of the final dates of the tour. He invited some fans onto the bus, smoked dabs with them, and passed out sitting upright with his head tilted back. Throughout the rest of the day, the friends and barely-acquaintances he was traveling with partied around him. Their Instagram posts showed Peep in the background, lying in the same position that he nodded off in. Four hours elapsed before anyone checked to see whether he was OK. He never woke up.

The official cause of death was listed as a lethal mix of Xanax and fentanyl—new drugs that resulted in the same ending, one that we lived through again just 10 months later with the death of Mac Miller. The difference now is the medium in which we bear witness: In the past, we’d watch musicians self-destruct through magazine pages or television interviews, if they were broadcast at all. With Peep, the star’s problems doubled as entertainment, playing out on our phones, available for anybody with internet access. They were as clear on that tour bus in November 2017 as they were backstage six months earlier. And just like at the Los Angeles show, no one was brave enough to put a stop to it when Peep needed help most.