At a critical turning point in the new Lil Peep documentary, Everybody’s Everything, the rapper falls into a wall of digital flames. The grainy footage is taken from a Los Angeles show on May 10, 2017, when Peep was emerging as emo-rap’s answer to Kurt Cobain. But that night he had taken too much of something, and the line between his depressive, drug-obsessed music and his own reality felt dangerously blurred.
After hobbling onto the stage, he began to mumble the words to his song “Hellboy”: “You don’t even know what I’ve been through.” A cluster of worried managers can be seen huddling in the wings, armed with emergency puke buckets, wondering if they need to call in a fake fire alarm to cancel the show. Instead, they flood the room with fog, hiding the despondent rapper as he stares into nothingness with his back turned to the audience. But right then, Peep snaps out of his drug-induced daze, wanders over to the sea of screaming fans before him, and lets loose the anguished vocal fry that turned his meditations on anxiety, mortality, sex, and drugs into hypnotically raw anthems.
Six months after that show, Peep’s heart stopped after he overdosed in the back of a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona. The toxicology report attributed his accidental death to a combination of fentanyl and Xanax; cocaine, marijuana, and opiates were also found in his system.
Across its two-hour runtime, Everybody’s Everything is less interested in moralizing Peep’s demons than in capturing his dualites—fatalistic would-be icon known as Lil Peep and vulnerable, gentle soul born Gustav Åhr. Executive produced by Peep’s mother, Liza Womack, along with the CEO of his agency and label First Access Entertainment, Sarah Stennett, and the existential auteur (and Womack family friend) Terrence Malick, the film offers an emotional sketch of a burgeoning superstar rather than an objective examination of his legacy. As Peep’s mother explained at a screening earlier this week, she dug through her son’s hard drives and first-grade journals in search of fragments that captured the boy she raised. These intimate intentions shine, though the film glosses over some of the more unseemly aspects of his persona and art.
While the story of a troubled young star burning too bright and flaming out isn’t new, Everybody’s Everything makes Peep’s story feel notably of the moment. Like the 2015 Amy Winehouse doc Amy, the film benefits from the fact that everyone is their own personal documentarian now, thanks to cellphones and social media. Pulling from a surplus of home movies, performance clips, photographs, tour footage, and Instagram videos, Everybody’s Everything details Peep’s ascent from doe-eyed toddler to insecure rebel to troubled star. The Instagram clips he recorded to communicate with his fans serve as the film’s most direct insights into the rapper’s mind. “If you meet me in real life you’ll find that I’m not very confident and I’m a very sensitive person and I have a lot of insecurities,” he softly tells the camera in one clip.
The most revelatory part of the film focuses on Peep’s adolescence in Long Beach, Long Island, giving context to the pain that sparked so much of his music. Our guides through this time are a jumble of Peep’s friends and collaborators, many of which are interviewed in their bedroom studios, in a nod to Peep’s own DIY origins. Their stories describe a boy rebelling against his suburban surroundings with every fiber of his being, eventually transforming his body into a billboard of resistance with tattoos and neon pink hair. But as a high school girlfriend attests, he was deeply insecure about other people’s judgement; his grandmother recalls how he wept when certain parents wouldn’t let their kids hang out with him.
In 2012, Peep’s parents divorced, and his father became an estranged figure in his son’s life. While Peep’s dad is not interviewed in the film, and the specific traumas of their relationship are not explored in detail, his mom talks about the moment when a 14-year-old Peep exposed his father’s infidelity to her. After his parents’ separation, Peep withdrew further into his dark cave of a bedroom. There, he began to exorcise his demons through his music, eventually building a community of like-minded artists, and an audience, through SoundCloud.
The film’s jump from grimy basement shows to sold-out, 3,000-capacity venues in Moscow may feel abrupt, but it mirrors Peep’s viral rise as a genre-breaker who mixed emo and trap in a way that felt thrillingly new. Suddenly, he’s seen being mobbed by Russian teens at an airport, performing to rabid fans shouting his every word back at him, and facing admirers who wanted to share their own personal traumas—and their drugs—with him. As many interviewees attest, Peep was racked with guilt about leaving his community of rappers and producers behind as the spotlight on him grew hotter.
He struggled to say no to the people around him and was overly generous with his time, money, and emotional energy. The film takes its name from the caption of one of Peep’s final Instagram posts— “I just wana be everybody’s everything I want too much from people but then I don’t want anything from them...”—and suggests that the stress and exhaustion caused by his desire to please was one of the reasons he self-medicated. Underscoring this is a section that quickly cuts from photographs of Peep with his loved ones to shots of him doing lines of coke in the back of a van and slumped over on the ground at an airport baggage carousel.
The film contends that a major bulwark against the chaos threatening to swallow Peep’s life was his maternal grandfather, John Womack, a Harvard historian who has written extensively about Latin American Marxism and labor movements. Womack is emphasized as Peep’s male role model, a figure he devoutly admired; one close friend recalls that Peep once said his grandfather would be the one to welcome him to heaven.
The sound of Womack reading snippets of the forthright letters he wrote to his grandson are heard throughout the film, serving as its emotional core. Ranging from condolences for a stolen bike to sage advice about manhood, Womack addresses his beloved “tattooed poet” with empathy and respect. “I can tell you, I see pure gold in you,” he reads with a sage serenity. “The wounds your father gave you, god did not heal, but did close even if in scars, so that you received this strength to stand up against him for yourself, to declare, just as a boy, your independence.” Delivered over a ghostly score by Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, these sequences add a contemplative quality that feels directly inspired by Malick.
But Womack’s wisdom ultimately can’t protect Peep. The film doesn’t shy away from the tragic circumstances of Peep’s death and instead flashes a series of images to emphasize the horror. There’s a Snapchat video from the night he died that shows Peep’s unconscious form in the background; a tour manager’s frantic 911 call; a photo of Peep’s lifeless body on the floor, covered in defibrillator pads. Most devastating is a picture of his mother mourning over her son’s corpse, seemingly taken at the mortuary. Though Peep foretold his premature death with an almost boastful fervor, seeing his crumpled, cold body is startling.
Keeping with its impressionistic tone, Everybody’s Everything never points fingers regarding Peep’s death. But just before the film’s festival premiere this March, the circumstances surrounding the tragedy grew more complicated: A thorough Rolling Stone story alleged that Peep’s talent agency, First Access Entertainment, provided him with a variety of illegal drugs, ostensibly propping him up to play shows while ignoring his well-being. Just last month, Liza Womack sued the company for negligence, breach of contract, and the wrongful death of her son. First Access is a constant presence in the film, and several of the individuals named in the suit appear as talking heads. Directors Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan became attached to the film via their connections to both Peep’s estate and First Access, and their neutral attitude on his death seems like a conscious choice. Nevertheless, Rolling Stone’s allegations, furthered by the lawsuit, haunt the film’s final act.
No matter who, exactly, is to blame for Peep’s death, this week’s screening of Everybody’s Everything made it clear that his loss is still an open wound. After the film, Liza Womack patiently answered questions from several tattooed, pink-haired audience members. One person shyly asked what she would say to young people dealing with depression and anxiety. Looking directly at the fan, Womack recalled the advice she offered her son the day before he died: “Be gentle with yourself.”
