It’s hard to deny that X made a major impact on his fans – especially those suffering in some form or another. (X’s mother disputes this, claiming that pregnancy hormones were never detected in Ayala.) Ayala said she was pregnant with his child at the time. He was promptly arrested on charges of false imprisonment, witness tampering and aggravated battery. In early October of that year, Ayala showed up at a South Florida police station, badly battered, claiming X had physically assaulted her. “She thinks I’m gonna kill her,” X said of Ayala in a secretly recorded 2016 conversation. “She was a shell of a human,” the friend recalls of Ayala around that time period. In one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, a friend of X and Ayala’s recalls hearing the rapper drowning her in their bathroom tub. X’s best songs – from “Sad!” to “Revenge” to “Jocelyn Flores” – showcase a versatile artist deftly able to channel his pain into unflinching, oftentimes beautiful portraits of confession.īut, as the years went on, X’s demons continued to haunt him, eventually resulting in the 2016 assault of Ayala. The teenage Onfroy eventually found solace in music, which functioned as “an antidepressant.” It’s also where he showed off a sensitive, emotional and deeply wounded side.
“This is a person who was looking for love and dealing with some really raw early-life experiences.”
“The troubles he was facing were truly emotional and revolved around the need to be understood,” Folayan says of X. “We spoke all the time about how he was feeling.” “And as he rose to fame, I knew that added pressure would only make it worse,” Cleopatra Bernard tells GQ, noting that neither of them believed in prescription medication to treat mental illness, instead turning to alternative methods like “mushroom tea and weed.” “I was very concerned,” she adds. At age 18, he revealed to her that he heard voices in his head. X’s battle with his mental health was something he openly discussed with his mother.
In what turned out to be a rare occurrence, the outlet’s journalists got the rapper to open up during a series of soul-baring interviews. Unlike so many other recent posthumous documentaries, what makes Look At Me! so powerful is that X’s voice is a clear and present one: in 2017, a year prior to his passing, and upon his release from prison, FADER spent two days with the artist. That was the biggest tension for us and the biggest challenge.” “Tensions ran high sometimes but we wanted to tell the whole story. “We had to tell the true story,” he says. Rob Stone, founder of FADER, who also served as executive-producer on the film, concurs.
“If it’s going to be a redemption story then I’m going to have to see that evidence.” “Ultimately,” the filmmaker says, “the viewer can decide for themselves” what to make of the film’s central figure. While the director admits that X’s mother (who serves as a producer on the film) hoped this would be a redemption story for her son, “I told her, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be a redemption story or not,’’’ Folayan recalls. Folayan tells GQ the film only could work if she assessed X’s entire, oftentimes-contradictory dichotomies.