Notorious

Notorious (2009) is a biographical music drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director George Tillman Jr. traces how a Brooklyn kid named Christopher Wallace became the rapper Notorious B.I.G. and was shot dead at twenty-four.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Teenage Christopher (Jamal Woolard) sells crack on the corner, but his mouth is quicker than his hustle and the rhymes he writes stick. Producer Sean "Puffy" Combs (Derek Luke) signs him to Bad Boy Records, and within a couple of years the heavyset street kid turns into a star. Around him are his mother Voletta (Angela Bassett), who won't excuse his past, a sharp-tongued Lil' Kim (Naturi Naughton), and a friend turned rival, Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie).

The script was shaped with input from Wallace's mother and Combs himself, and the rapper's own son plays young Christopher. The film doesn't skip the jail time, the betrayals, or the East Coast-West Coast feud that ended in gunfire on a Los Angeles street in 1997. Stream Notorious (2009) online on iFILM.