Brief Lives.

Christopher Wallace, who became known as the rapper Biggie Smalls, or the Notorious B.I.G., was born in 1972 and was brought up in Bedford-Stuyvesant by his mother, Voletta Wallace, a middle-class woman from Jamaica. When Chris dropped out of school, at the age of seventeen, and became a crack dealer, it was not for lack of love or support; Voletta, a teacher who eventually earned a master's degree in education, adored him. In the next few years, Wallace was in and out of jail, and he carried a gun at times. An inveterate scribbler, he had written down rhymes since he was a boy, and he made some tapes that came to the attention of the rap entrepreneur Sean (Puffy) Combs, who helped him shape his material and brought out his first album, "Ready to Die," in 1994. Organically conceived, with a narrative line chronicling Biggie's youth and his life on the streets, the album announced his belief that a violent death would be his inevitable fate. Biggie boasted and taunted his way through songs with a masterly control of rhythm, internal rhyme, metaphor, and story. After the album was released, he became embroiled in the wars between East Coast and West Coast rappers, and in 1997, following a party in Los Angeles, he was shot and killed. He was twenty-four years old; his second album, "Life After Death," came out two weeks after he died.

Was Chris Wallace a nice middle-class boy who put himself in danger because he sensed that, in order to become a rap artist, he needed to pack the street into his resume? "If you was a nice, ordinary kid, you was an easy mark for the wannabe gangsters," he says at the beginning of the new biopic "Notorious"--meaning that he had no choice but to be a tough. Still, the authenticity issue lingers around hip-hop, which is a cunningly crafted show-business phenomenon as well as an expression of urban culture. What I wanted from the movie was some clarity about Biggie Smalls's motives and a sense of how much of him was created and how much was genuine. What I got was both conventional and confused--an uneasy mixture of biographical snapshots and ham-handed moralism, arrayed in a dual narrative track in which Biggie (Jamal Woolard) haplessly slides toward death as he slowly, and with many steps backward, rises spiritually toward manhood. Written by Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker, and directed by George Tillman, Jr., the movie teaches various lessons without saying anything coherent or illuminating. The man who wrote songs with such titles as "Me and My Bitch," and lyrics like "Niggaz on the corner / I ain't forget you niggaz / My triple beam niggaz, word up," is shown listening to Richard Pryor on TV as he says that "nigger" should be dropped from the language. How are we supposed to take that? As a rebuke to Biggie? As his true opinion? And, shortly before Biggie dies, he instructs his little daughter never to allow any man to call her "bitch." Is he simply contradicting himself? Is he a hypocrite? Did he have regrets? Or are the filmmakers attempting to clean him up for posterity? Voletta Wallace is a co-producer of the film (as are Biggie's managers, and Sean Combs is the executive producer), and, as the movie tells it, Biggie, at twenty-four, is on the verge of becoming the honorable son she always wanted him to be. Whether this is true or not, I'm pretty sure that it's not a good idea for an artist's mother to control any part of his biography. No doubt Mme. Rimbaud, given the chance, would have preferred to have her disreputable Arthur come out looking like a precocious Catholic schoolboy who only briefly dabbled in absinthe. In the movie, Voletta (the sternly upright Angela Bassett) is a saint with a powerful tongue, and Sean Combs (Derek Luke) is an artistic and commercial genius with infallible taste and judgment. The movie leaves us with the sense that, twelve years after Biggie Smalls's death, a lot of people are trying to extract whatever profit or pride they can from the chaotic life of a young man who was, as he well knew, a work in progress.

When swagger is what you're selling, swagger may have to be manufactured, though what counts in the end is the work itself, whatever experience is behind it. As Biggie, the heavyset rapper Jamal Woolard comes off, to my eyes, as a man with a gentler face and temper than the original, but when Woolard sings, changing his flow to match Biggie's, he's both powerful and persuasive. The songs still have a coruscating insistence, and I would have liked to learn more about the professional details--how Biggie wrote the songs, how much rehearsal and how many retakes were needed to get the music into ...