In Whose Name?, the limited-release documentary painfully and explicitly documenting the implosion of the artist once known as Kanye West, almost didn’t make it to theaters.
Nor to any screen for that matter. After a bout of public antisemitism in 2022 in which the rapper-mogul-producer-aesthete now known solely as Ye threatened to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” one early distributor instantly pulled the plug, as director Nico Ballesteros’s manager recently told GQ. This episode is not to be confused with the antisemitism controversy of 2025, when Ye released a single titled “Heil Hitler.”
No one else would bite, and those close to the film’s production began to wonder if it would ever be released. Its fate fell into limbo until Simran Singh, a music business attorney, assembled a series of individual deals with theater distributors to show it. The film debuted on Sept. 19 to little fanfare and just over $700,000 in box office receipts, and will soon be out of theaters, if not public memory entirely.
It’s easy to understand why. In Whose Name?, assembled from purportedly more than 3,000 hours of behind-the-scenes footage shot by the 20-something Ballesteros after he somehow persuaded the mercurial Ye to allow him into his entourage, is a brutal watch. At the slightest provocation, Ye bullies, hectors, and screams at everyone from Paris fashion-show lackeys to the mother of his child. He boasts about abandoning his medication for a bipolar diagnosis. Like the lunatic on your morning commute, he inundates everyone in earshot with word salads about his greatness and insight, and the wickedness and inequities of his oppressors.
It is unsparingly embarrassing for a man who was once, and not without good reason, considered the preeminent musical genius and trendsetter of his generation. And yet, it carries an unmistakable if subtle whiff of hagiography: particularly nasty elements of Ye’s public life are glossed over; interminable chunks of time are given over to his ragged, Steve Jobs-through-a-broken-translator monologues about art; Ballesteros places a strange, mostly unchallenged emphasis on his boasts about his fortune.
The first-time documentarian told GQ that his subject called the documentary “crisp” and watched it three times, giving it his full attention. Given Ye’s hair-trigger temper, his patience for this undeniably unflattering film can almost certainly be chalked up to its sop to “raising awareness” about the importance of mental health and paper-thin acknowledgment that the full duality of Ye’s personality will be depicted.
This line would be more persuasive, though, if the film were a more sophisticated psychological portrait, not to mention if it had depicted him doing anything remotely charming or of enduring value. Rather, it shows what happened between 2018 and 2024 as he steadily lost touch with what earned him both the statuses of cultural godhead and patriarch in his own home, choosing instead, as so many others have during that period, to cling to his persecution complex, albeit one enabled by his vast fortune and celebrity.
The bizarre encounters and conflicts pile up. After an infamous 2018 Saturday Night Live monologue in which he accused the show’s staff of “bullying” him for his support of President Donald Trump, “Weekend Update” anchor Michael Che corners him backstage, Ballesteros’ phone camera rolling all the while. Che is pained, but firm: Why would Ye air that grievance while the show was live, instead of discussing it in private with the performers ostensibly committed to the success of their joint project?
Ye has no answer and visibly crumbles before Che’s demand for basic interpersonal dignity, in one of the film’s more uncomfortable moments. It’s implicitly, tremendously unflattering to a blowhard, out-of-touch Chris Rock, depicted just moments before nonsensically comparing Ye’s deluded tirade to Sinead O’Connor’s notorious protest of child abuse in the Catholic Church.
The other people Ye tries to big-foot into indulging his perverse Peter Pan complex fare more poorly. He needles and criticizes a team of well-meaning Swiss architects, the crew for a crucial fashion show, the producers in charge of the 2021 concert spectacle for Donda, his last musical release of any note.
The diagnosis is clear: No one, but no one, will tell Ye “no.” Except, it must be said, the women in his life. Ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her mother Kris Jenner are depicted trying to reach Ye through his fog of grandiosity, to no avail. They are, of course, summarily jettisoned amid the artist’s 2020 vanity presidential campaign, the premise and content of which still beggar belief.
Ballesteros goes notably light on this, including the element that cemented Ye’s slide into the cultural ignominy which he now occupies, and which nearly doomed this flawed, but undeniably worthy documentary: his relationship with Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist influencer now immortally pegged by Tucker Carlson as a “weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago.”
Without the inclusion of Fuentes, who dined with Ye and Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, the viewers are left scratching their heads about how In Whose Name? catapults in roughly 25 minutes of screen time from the joyous, road-not-taken gospel career Ye briefly enjoyed in 2019 to boasting on a little-known hip-hop podcast called Drink Champs that “I could say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me” from their billion-plus-dollar retail partnership.
Reader, they dropped him. Your critic points this out less to litigate “cancel culture” than to point out that, without the fullness of this story, Ballesteros’s In Whose Name? must remain a headless shaggy-dog story, a series of furtive episodes in the life of a man who engages the world with maximum hostility and minimum humility at every moment. A documentary that viewed Ye through a primarily political or ideological lens would have, to be sure, been tiresome; one that ignores that dimension entirely simply tests the knowledgeable viewer’s patience.
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Instead that viewer gets the confrontation without the genius, creating a viewing experience that is fundamentally unenlightening despite its gossipy appeal, although Ballesteros’s footage of Ye’s elaborately choreographed, capital-C Charismatic Wyoming church services, as well as the Wagnerian psychological opus of his 2021 Donda performance at Chicago’s Soldier Field, reveal hints and echoes of why some cared so much in the first place. Did viewers really need Ballesteros and his crew to distill 3,000 hours of dehumanizing, surveillance-style footage of Kanye West’s most personal moments to reveal that he is a brutal, insecure egomaniac who makes questionable financial decisions?
In Whose Name?, then, is less an explanation of West’s downfall than part of it, errant mythmaking borne of petty human egoism. If you must revisit this chapter of American life — and some of us are doomed to it — simply put on Graduation (2007) and reminisce about that moment when a simple, flawed pop star could be a simply flawed man, and never the twain should meet.
Derek Robertson is a writer in New York.
