Mac Miller's Filmography Is A Bittersweet Portrait Of Struggle and Success

Earlier this month, Canadian filmmaker C.J. Wallis reported plans to prepare a documentary about late rapper Mac Miller, complete with animated segments and told through, as he later revealed to Variety, “vignette-ed stories.” Yet, right after his public announcement, Miller’s estate requested that Wallis not move forward with it at this time, a plea Wallis rapidly agreed to honor. “We immediately [complied] because the last thing we'd want is to negatively impact anyone involved,” he tweeted of the plans. “Quite the opposite.”


While it would have been cool to be able to see a cartoon Mac gliding through his life stories — and as we continue to hear his voice on record even immediately after his death — the rapper already left a portrait of himself and his tribulations through two essential pieces of film: his 2013 reality MTV2 show, Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family, and his 2016 documentary about drug use, Stopped Making Excuses. Through these, he provides nearly unfiltered access to his own life along with conveys a understanding of his past actions — like past drug use and his continued struggles with substance abuse — in his own words. Both stories help illustrate the man he was and paint a picture of the man he was becoming.


Most Dope Family kicked off on in 2013 whenever he moved from Pittsburgh, his hometown, to Los Angeles to record his album Watching Movies With the Sound Off. It starts memorably; in its first episode, Miller wakes up on a keyboard, vomiting. His first words immediately after recovering: “I guess we’re beginning this TV show.” Most Dope Family wasn’t focused on storylines or dramatic situations. Miller and his companions worked to further his career while dealing with the craziness of L.A. As kids from Pittsburgh. It went big, needless to say, showing him purchasing expensive cars as rappers often do, although it also zoomed in for more intimate moments. In a bonus clip from Season 1, Miller surprises his mom at her home for a cup of tea, sitting at her kitchen table, laughing at absolutely nothing at all.


Most Dope Family member was as close to authentic, unfiltered celebrity access as one could desire to get and it also ran for two complete seasons before Miller determined to end it, talking about the involves of reality television were “too much” to balance with a busy tour schedule. It covered a couple of essential moments in Miller’s story: from the development of his jazz alter-ego Larry Lovestein, who released a EP in 2012, to Pittsburgh’s first Mac Miller Day, on September 20, 2013, while he was given a key to the city. Yet it also held hints of his darker story. In the fourth episode of Season 1, he flippantly tells his mother in the middle of an everyday conversation that he could just be going to get some @crack. It’s a joke, however by this point, Miller’s relationship with illegal substances was famed, thanks to the introspective Macadelic, where he confessed to using them to cope with his lightning-fast lifestyle. In the next season, Miller buys two dogs, an otherwise heartwarming moment punctured by his team banding with each other to designate godparents for them in the scenario of Miller’s untimely death.


Mac would be serious, also. In 2016, The Fader released Stopped Making Excuses, a documentary about his rise that probed even deeper into his insecurities and misgivings about his own career. He muses as to whether he should or shouldn’t rap because he’s white and why him doing it gives hope for white kids like him to pursue the career. It also finds Mac at his most candid once discussing his relationship to illegal narcotics, which intensified any time whenever he moved to Los Angeles: “It began with me sitting indoors all day, and then you get bored, then you’re like, ‘I can just be high and have a whole adventure in this room.’”


Miller is raw in these moments, explaining that he tried illegal narcotics just because they were passed to him; that marijuana made him paranoid so he searched for other contraband — he says in the documentary that he “went through about everything” — to create him more relaxed; that he hated being sober. Yet he also chronicles the journey out of his dependency, pushed by his fear of overdosing. “There’s no legendary romance. You don’t go down in history because you overdose – you just die,” he says at one point. Though the video’s conclusion appears to find Mac in a state of better control over his habits, he also acknowledges that he does “still get fucked up all of the time.” He insists, right now tragically, that he understands what he’s doing.


Most Dope Family member and Stopped Making Excuses are documentaries in their own right. In the absence of a “definitive,” all-encompassing Mac Miller story, we have these moments that enable us to celebrate his achievements and monitor his growth, all while recognizing the struggles he reckoned with for his entire life. They’re a welcome counterpart to his music, which sought meaning in his demons and worked to facilitate healing. Most Dope Family member is a series of residence movies chronicling a kid just having fun at the high of life; Stopped Making Excuses explores the darkness that came with his success. We don’t need to wait for another filmmaker to piece with each other the narrative of Mac Miller. His own filmography tells it for him.