The Prince we never knew

Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.

It’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.

The next sequence starts to probe the origins of Prince’s genius, how it grew alongside a gnawing desire for recognition. His sister, Tyka Nelson, a woman with owlish eyes and pink and purple streaks in her hair, appears onscreen. She describes the violence in their household growing up. How their musician father’s face changed when he hit their mother. The ire he directed at his son, on whom he bestowed his former stage name, Prince — a gift, but also a burden, a reminder that the demands of supporting his children had caused him to abandon his own musical career. Prince would risk lashings by sneaking over to the piano and plinking away at it — the son already embarked on his life’s work of besting his father, the father giving and withdrawing love, the son doing the same.

Cut to Jill Jones, one in a long line of girlfriend-muses whom Prince anointed, styled, encouraged and criticized. Hers is one of the most anguished testimonies in the film, revealing a side of Prince many of his fans would rather not see. Late one night in 1984, she and a friend visited Prince at a hotel. He started kissing the friend, and in a fit of jealousy, Jones slapped him. She says he then looked at her and said, “Bitch, this ain’t no [expletive] movie.” They tussled, and he began to punch her in the face over and over. She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career. So she backed off. Yet for a time, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, and stayed in his orbit for many more years. Recounting the incident three decades later, she is still furious, still processing the stress of being involved with him.

In the next sequence, it’s the evening of the premiere of “Purple Rain,” the movie, which will go on to win the Academy Award for best original song score in 1985. Prince’s tour manager, Alan Leeds, was with him in the back of a limo on the way to the ceremony. He remembers one of Prince’s bodyguards turning to Prince and saying: “This is going to be the biggest day of your life! They say every star in town is there!” And Prince clutched Leeds’s hand, trembling in fear. But then, as Leeds tells it, some switch flipped, and “he caught himself.” Prince’s eyes turned hard. He was back in control. “That was it,” Leeds says. “But for maybe 10 seconds, he completely lost it. And I loved it. Because it showed he was human!” In the next shot, we see Prince emerging from the limo and walking down the red carpet in an iridescent purple trench coat over a creamy ruffled collar, his black curls piled high. He swaggers, twirling a flower, unbothered: a creature of regal remove.

These four moments happen back to back, about three hours into the film. I watched it for the first time on a winter evening in 2023, and during this particular sequence, my body clenched as it registered contradictory intensities: amazement, pity, disgust, tenderness. Like most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I had an image of Prince emblazoned in my mind: wonderfully strange; a gender-bending, dreamy master of funk. He flouted and floated above all categories and gave permission to generations of kids to do the same. Edelman’s film deepened those impressions, while at the same time removing Prince’s many veils. This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling. The film is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. But then, always, there is relief: the miracle of Prince’s music — a release for me and a release, above all, for Prince.

Behold him writhing at the microphone, shrieking out the chorus of “The Beautiful Ones,” a song about the pain of love. Wendy Melvoin, a member of his band the Revolution and one of the people with whom Prince was most intimate (though only briefly, only ever briefly), tells Edelman that when “he’s screaming, there is a look in his eyes of pure torture.” She quotes the lyrics “Do you want him, or do you want me? ‘Cause I want you!” “It feels like the big struggle of his entire life,’’ Melvoin says. “The consequence of you not choosing me is too much to bear.”

The sequence I just described is 20 minutes long. Imagine sustaining this density of character analysis for 520 more, which is what Edelman has done. In the process, he offers one answer to a question that has agonized the culture at large for the last decade. How should we think about artists whose moral failings are exposed? Edelman manages to present a deeply flawed person while still granting him his greatness — and his dignity. Wesley Morris, a critic at The Times and one of a small group of people who have seen the film, told me, “It’s one of the only works I have ever seen that approximates the experience of suffering with and suffering through and alongside genius.”

The film took Edelman almost five years to finish, and it nearly broke him. Whenever he makes a documentary, he told me, “It’s like willingly walking into the jail or locking myself up into a box like Houdini and being like, ‘Can I get out?’ " But he had been locked in for a long time, often working nights and weekends, chasing down recalcitrant subjects who seemed haunted by their friendships with Prince and researching in Prince’s personal archive, which was filled with gaps and elisions. Prince kept slipping away from him. “How can you tell the truth about someone who, when you’re talking to people, they all had different things to say?” Edelman told me. “How can you tell the truth about someone who never told the truth about himself?”

Over a year and a half, I had observed as Edelman continued to perfect his film, working to capture the essence of Prince, even as it became slowly, painfully clear that it would most likely never air. The Prince estate had changed hands, and the new executors objected to the project. Last spring, they saw a cut and, claiming that it misrepresented Prince, entered into a protracted battle with Netflix, which owns the rights to the film, to prevent its release. As of today, there is no indication that the film will ever come out. It has been like watching a monument being swallowed by the sea.

I first met Edelman at his office in Brooklyn in February 2023. His films have a plain-spoken, confident erudition, and I expected the person behind the camera to be similarly poised. But I soon discovered that he has a spiky conversational style and, beneath it, a sensitive, hyperattuned temperament. His last film, “O.J.: Made in America,” which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2017, is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious documentaries ever made. Running about eight hours, it shows how O.J. Simpson’s rise and fall contains the whole history of America’s race pathologies. As A.O. Scott wrote in The Times, it has “the grandeur and authority of the best long-form nonfiction. If it were a book, it could sit on the shelf alongside ‘The Executioner’s Song’ by Norman Mailer and the great biographical works of Robert Caro.”

Edelman folded his six-foot frame into a small armchair, slouching in a black hoodie. Affixed to the wall behind him was an intricate timeline of Prince’s life, hundreds of neatly typed labels arranged in rows, almost covering the wall. He described the soul-shredding experience of trying to figure out the person who lay behind that timeline, creating as deep a portrait as he could of someone who spent his life trying to avoid being fully seen.

The project was not his idea. In fact, when he was first approached about it in the spring of 2019 by Lisa Nishimura, the vice president of independent film and documentary features at Netflix, he was doubtful. Though he had his own indelible Prince memory (8 years old, visiting New York City, “Little Red Corvette” pumping out of his headphones as he looked up at the skyscrapers), he wasn’t an ardent fan. He knew several filmmakers for whom Prince was a white whale; he respected Prince’s artistry — who didn’t? — but he also was aware of what a defining figure he was for so many fans, who might not enjoy seeing their hero inspected with the intensity he brings to his projects.

Edelman was the toast of the film world after his Oscar win for “O.J.: Made in America.” The shape of the Simpson film had formed in his mind almost instantly, in part because he could see that Simpson’s story was a meeting point for two of his lifelong interests. The son of the civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman and the progressive lawyer Peter Edelman, who were the third interracial couple to marry in Virginia in 1968, Edelman grew up steeped in the history of the Black American struggle. He is also a sports fanatic. The Prince project was the inverse of “O.J.”: Simpson was so visible, his story so raked over, and Edelman made new meaning of it; but Prince was a mystery. Despite the existence of several biographies and oral histories, there was still so much about Prince’s life that was unknown, and the challenge would be to try to figure out who he really was.

What ultimately persuaded Edelman to take on the film was a potential treasure trove of new material. For tens of millions of dollars, according to a source familiar with the negotiation, Netflix had secured from the estate exclusive access to Prince’s personal archive, referred to among Princeologists as “the vault.” It had been an actual room, in the basement of his fortresslike home and studio, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn., filled with unreleased recordings and concert footage and the master copies of all his music and drawings and photographs and who knew what else. In life, Prince was defiantly private. He rarely sat for interviews, and when he did talk to the press, he often spoke in koans. There were so many unexplained oddities. The changing of his name to a symbol — a move that was widely mocked and that no one ever fully explained. His many battles with record companies, including the years when, feuding with Warner Brothers over control of his output and his master recordings, he took to performing with the word “slave” written on his face. His decade of perfect albums, followed by years of uneven, often impenetrable ones. There was, most perplexing of all, his death from a fentanyl overdose, when he always seemed to disdain drugs and alcohol. Access to the vault presented a chance to tell a more detailed story about Prince than had emerged before.

Prince’s estate, which was then being administered by a bank in Minnesota, would have no editorial influence over the project, Edelman was told. Edelman and Netflix would retain final cut, though the estate could review the film for factual accuracy. He decided to sign on.

Edelman and his team, including the editor Bret Granato and the producer Nina Krstic, spent a full year watching tape they found in the vault. At first, they were excited by the material: hours upon hours of band rehearsals and music videos, all of Prince’s never-before-seen performances, including pristine 16-millimeter film from his tour for the 1981 album “Controversy” and elegiac scenes from one of his final Piano and a Microphone shows in 2016. The footage moved the film’s editors to tears, but though he would make ample use of it, Edelman knew he didn’t want to make a concert film. What he wanted was to tell the story of the arc of those years, of the person who resided in the gaps among Prince’s many metamorphoses.

But it soon became clear that there was almost nothing that was spontaneous or personal in the vault, almost no footage of him recording or writing. At one point, they were excited to discover a few home movies of Prince horsing around with girlfriends, but when they watched the tapes, they appeared to have been deliberately damaged. As Granato, one of two main editors on the film along with Gabriel Rhodes, put it, the vault was “not all that different from an Instagram account or a Facebook page.” It was manicured, curated, just the way Prince wanted it.

After a year, some of the most revealing material was scraps of unintentional candor — moments when Prince thought a camera wasn’t rolling and “would transition into a different person,” Granato told me. “He’d turn inward, look at the floor.” At first, “it looks like nothing, because he’s just looking, quiet,’’ but the accumulation of these moments was revelatory: “Within these things, there’s a lot of vulnerability. There’s shyness. There’s a lack of confidence that butts up against confidence in this really interesting way.” What did these moments mean? They needed the people who knew Prince to tell them.

Edelman, with the help of the producer Tamara Rosenberg, carefully tried to penetrate the concentric circles around Prince. “It’s a complicated culture in that Prince world,” Rosenberg told me. “People are very protective for various reasons.” It’s no surprise that interview subjects would be guarded about the personal life of a world-famous celebrity, but the vehemence of the refusal in some cases, combined with a sense of suspicion about their motives, was a continual source of frustration for Edelman and his team. Edelman sometimes felt as if Prince was still dictating what could and couldn’t be said. “What are you not telling me?” he found himself wondering. “What’s the big secret?”

Rosenberg spent hours each day on the phone, trying to reassure everyone. As the months went by, the team slowly persuaded more people — former bandmates, sound engineers, assistants, bodyguards, managers, a hairstylist, girlfriends, childhood friends, record-company executives and Prince’s sister — to come on camera.

Edelman’s collaborators spoke of his supreme skill as an interviewer, how he builds rapport with his subjects, prodding them to reveal shockingly honest feelings about their lives. His method is simple but profound: preparation and duration. He inhales every document he can, synthesizes all he learns, prepares pages of questions and then, when he is in the room with an interview subject — often for many hours at a time — sets the notes aside. He knows so much about the people he is speaking to that he disarms them, producing obscure episodes from their pasts that intrigue them. He is “offering them a real space to talk about their experience. To really roam around and find the right words,” Rosenberg told me. “You see people thinking on camera,” and their buried memories begin to surface.

The story of Prince that was emerging was a story of a person bent on fame and control. From the very beginning, when he signed his first contract with Warner Brothers at age 18, he insisted on a level of independence unusual for an artist so green. When Warner Brothers suggested that Maurice White from Earth, Wind and Fire produce his debut album, Prince refused and did it himself. He became a domineering band leader — ruthlessly extracting from his musicians the sounds he was hearing in his head, often subjecting them to 10-, 12-hour days and growling in their faces about their insufficiencies. Edelman was finding that the people Prince worked with were still afraid of him — yet in many cases were also tenderly protective.

As Edelman completed his interviews — more than 70 of them — he realized there wasn’t some big secret that people were hiding. Instead, what he found were the defining traumas of Prince’s childhood and his constant recapitulating of them. The story unfolds slowly, hauntingly, over the course of the film.

Prince’s parents, John Nelson and Mattie Shaw, had a volatile, violent relationship. They split up when Prince was 6 or 7, and his mother remarried a man named Hayward Baker. Two people in the film — a youth counselor and a childhood friend — said Prince told them that Baker locked Prince in his bedroom for a period of time (the youth counselor said it was for six weeks), passing food through the door. When Prince emerged, according to the counselor, his ebullience was gone: “He went inside.”

According to people in the film, Prince’s mother kicked him out of her house when he was around 12; she sent him to live with his father, whom he idolized as a musician. But after catching Prince with a girl in his room for the third time, his father, a strict Seventh-day Adventist, kicked him out, too. Prince was 14, and as his sister Tyka tells Edelman, “It broke his heart.” He stayed with various friends, for many years sleeping on a mattress in the basement of his best friend, André Cymone.

Prince had always been short and was brutally teased. Edelman’s team found footage from a local news channel of him as a boy, age 11, being interviewed along with other children at his school. Standing behind a taller boy, he hops up and down, determined to be seen. By the time he reached his full adult height of 5-foot-2, he had accepted that he wouldn’t be a basketball player (though he was a lifelong, maniacally competitive baller) and developed a swagger to counteract his smallness. At 16, he was already getting a local reputation as a guitarist and songwriter in various bands. But the sense that his own parents couldn’t apprehend his gifts, that they found his presence distasteful, was a deep gash in his psyche. Prince tells us the story himself, in miniature, in the song “When Doves Cry”: “How can you just leave me standing/Alone in a world that’s so cold?” I had always taken Prince’s yelps and cries as transgressive, in-your-face sexuality; watching the film, I understood that they also carried real grief.

As his fame grew, he had a troubled relationship with his family members. His mother was in and out of his life, at times asking him for money. He and his only full sibling, Tyka, who sometimes abused drugs, were estranged for periods. He would draw close to his father, buying him a house and cars, bringing him as his date to an awards show, the two men dressed in matching purple suits. He continued to hunger for his father’s praise (a touching inscription on a copy of his cosmically great album “1999″ flashes across the screen: “Hi Poppa, please play side with a star on it. It’s longer and better. Love you, Prince”), but John Nelson’s love was inconsistent and self-aggrandizing. In the film, we see him take credit in interviews for all Prince was, even demanding a co-writing credit on some of his songs, angering Prince and leading to more years of estrangement.

A byproduct of this familial absence was Prince’s constant attempts to create for himself his own stable family. He fantasized about becoming a loving husband and father. But Prince could not really attach: He turned and grew paranoid, and despite the entourages that he assembled and disassembled around himself, he was ultimately, terribly alone.

Several years into the interviewing, there were still crucial holdouts among those who had been closest to Prince. It wasn’t until the fourth year of the project that Edelman and Rosenberg managed to persuade Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, the guitarist and keyboardist from the Revolution and two of his most important collaborators, to participate. After interviewing them, Edelman breathed a sigh of relief: He had found the emotional core of the film.

The period when they worked with Prince was one of his most joyous and fertile. He made his career-defining albums “1999″ and “Purple Rain” and went from being a niche act to a major rock star. His band was tight, flamboyant and funky, an amalgam of races and genders and sexualities, revolutionary in name and sound and intent.

Melvoin and Coleman offered Edelman a singular perspective on Prince during the years when he was molding himself into an astronomical musical force. The women were a couple, and Melvoin says in the film that Prince loved their relationship. “He was really intrigued by the freedom that we felt about ourselves. That gave him the strength to explore his own gender-bending sexuality.” Coleman talked about applying makeup to his back acne before going onstage and intuiting how alone he sometimes felt, strutting around half-naked. “I felt his vulnerability. Because he was going to go out onstage and take off his coat and be sexy.” Melvoin describes the monumentality of his talent, how he would disappear and come back with new songs in what seemed like minutes — but also the buzzing, compulsive quality of it. Music poured out of him with a geyser-like force that he couldn’t turn off. No one could possibly keep up.

The three of them had an almost telepathic working relationship. “It felt pretty intimate,” Melvoin tells Edelman. “And I guess our music was the sex.” For a time, Prince was able to accept their love — to build a kind of family with Melvoin and Coleman and the other members of the Revolution. But his pattern was to create closeness that could edge into suffocation — and then suddenly turn away.

He became romantically involved with Melvoin’s identical twin, Susannah, another of Prince’s muses, who was co-lead of the Family, one of the many bands he created. She also speaks insightfully in the film, describing how he could switch between doting care and alarming coldness. When they moved in together, she told Edelman, he monitored her phone calls and discouraged her from leaving the house. He tried to prevent her from seeing Wendy — who had told Prince, in essence, that if he messed with Susannah, he was messing with them both. In their interviews, you can see that the two women are still working through their hurt. Yet neither can divorce herself from sympathy. “He was so marginalized as a kid,” Susannah says. “He was always trying to find his worth. Where do I belong? Who’s going to accept me? Who’s going to take me as I am?”

In these women, he had found that acceptance, collaboration and love. It’s heart-rending to watch as he destroys it. When members of the Revolution tried to negotiate for higher pay, according to Coleman, he told them that they wouldn’t ask for more money if they really loved him — a pattern in his working relationships, another person who worked for Prince told me. They threatened to leave, and he told them to go ahead. In 1986, he disbanded the Revolution, built a new band and started constructing Paisley Park, his Shangri-La in a cornfield outside Minneapolis, where he would gather and disperse new casts of characters every few years.

Prince was known as a bolsterer of women. He had a long list of collaborators with complex, sexy, mysterious personas of their own. Prince was fascinated by femininity and often embodied it himself, with his flowing locks and makeup and lacy underwear. He had an alter ego called Camille, inspired by a 19th-century French intersex woman, Herculine Barbin, in whose voice he sometimes sang. He wrote about his fluidity: “I’m not a woman/I’m not a man/I am something that you’ll never understand,” he sings in “I Would Die 4 U.” But as with so many aspects of Prince, his alignment with women contained opposing impulses: merging and control, support and domination.

Over time, Edelman and his team interviewed many of Prince’s protégées from the 1980s and ‘90s: Jill Jones, Carmen Electra, Robin Power, Anna Fantastic, Sheila E. and others. They were muses, girlfriends, baby dolls, many of them getting involved with him as teenagers (though he was careful not to sleep with them until they turned 18) and hanging around Paisley Park for months or years. They all appear in the film and give differing accounts of their experiences. Some, like Jill Jones, describe his cruelty and diminishment of them; others, like Electra and Fantastic, are still spellbound by their time with him and speak of how he buttressed their sense of self. Robin Power says that Prince truly thought of himself as part female; Jones explains how, fiercely competitive as he was, he tried to best her at her own femininity. The result is a many-faced portrait: The women emerge as variously funny, appealing, appalled, victimized, knowing. We’re asked to sit with Prince’s multiplying paradoxes for many hours, allowing them to unsettle one another.

One of the most disturbing parts of the film depicts Prince’s relationship with Mayte Garcia, who became his wife. Now a striking, doe-eyed 50-year-old woman in a flowing silk shirt, she describes how she met Prince when she was 16 and he was 35, after he saw tapes of her belly dancing. After two years of calls and visits, he invited her to dance with his band the New Power Generation. Prince told Garcia that he idolized her virginity, and though they became a couple, they didn’t have sex until she was 19. A letter that Prince wrote to her is shown onscreen: “u are a child of God — an angel and I worship u,” he writes (his I’s rendered in Prince’s signature style as a drawing of an eye). “I’ve known other women all my life, and I suspect I always will. I have a history.” He went on: “One of the main reasons I love and worship u is because u don’t have a history. And what’s more beautiful is that u don’t desire one.” He ends the letter by writing over and over again, like an incantation, “I will never leave u.”

On their wedding night, when Garcia was 22, Prince presented her with two new songs: “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife” and “Let’s Have a Baby.” She became pregnant not long after, much to Prince’s joy. He had clouds painted all over Paisley Park, built a playground and bought 10-speed bikes. He took Garcia’s ultrasound recordings into the studio and used the heartbeat in the song “Sex in the Summer.”

Eight months into the pregnancy, Garcia went into labor, and when their son was born, they discovered he had a disease called Pfeiffer syndrome Type 2 and was unable to breathe on his own. They jointly made the decision to take him off a respirator. In the film, Garcia slowly narrates the aftermath of the baby’s death. Almost immediately, Prince was on a plane, doing a show in Miami. Just days after the baby died, they shot a music video for the song “Betcha By Golly Wow!” in which they embrace on a hospital bed, in the same hospital where she had just given birth. A week after that, Garcia was on the floor of her room, weeping, when Prince walked in and announced that Oprah was due to arrive at Paisley Park that morning. She was coming to interview the couple to promote his new album, “Emancipation.” Garcia understood that she “had to put it together, had to be his wife.”

In the vault, Edelman’s team found footage from right before the interview began. Garcia appears in a white miniskirt and jacket. Prince criticizes her under his breath: “We can see up your dress.” The interview itself, which Edelman stitches into Garcia’s account of this time, is wrenching. Garcia settles herself into a chair next to him. At one point, Oprah turns to her and asks, brightly, “What would you like to say about your relationship?” Garcia offers a wavering smile and looks pleadingly at Prince. Garcia recalls the moment for Edelman. “I could barely look at her. I just kept looking at him like, ‘Help me keep it together.’” Oprah inquires about the status of her pregnancy. Prince had told Garcia not to say that the baby died, so she says nothing. After an awkward beat, he answers for her: “Well, our family exists. We’re just beginning it. And we’ve got many kids to have.”

This was the start of a period when Prince neglected, betrayed and ultimately abandoned the marriage. But the mode of the film is not to linger in judgment; it’s to probe, to try to make narrative sense out of the disparateness of Prince’s personality, in part by showing how his memory lives in the people who knew him. Garcia, now a self-possessed woman who retains an air of innocence amid the wreckage of her experience, can summon affection and understanding; she herself cannot seem to condemn him. Edelman allows us to see her own mythmaking, the moments in the interview when she seems magnetized by the fantastical love story she is narrating. “It’s what every woman wants to hear on her wedding night,” she says, describing his singing “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife,” her eyes filling with tears. She seems as mystified as we are by the starkness of Prince’s contradictions, still in thrall to his tenderness and brilliance and invested, perhaps, in having been the object of his prickly admiration.

Edelman presents the depth of Prince’s denial about the death of his baby — for years, he would never acknowledge it publicly — as more evidence of his inability to show how truly vulnerable he was: a motherless, fatherless child who longed to be protected by a family of his own. As the family-making enterprise was failing, it seems he sought a different form of protection. Over the next 15 years, he adhered to a strict religious observance, falling under the sway of an ersatz father figure, the musician Larry Graham, who insinuated himself into Prince’s life and instilled in him the Jehovah’s Witness theology. Another seemingly inexplicable chapter in Prince’s metamorphosis starts to make some kind of sense. That weird period when Prince kind of went off the deep end? The film shows how he was caught in a grief that he couldn’t admit to or comprehend, trying on many new guises in an attempt to shed it.

By the spring of 2023, Edelman and his team had assembled a cut of the film that was nine hours long, and they were still obsessively editing it, still trying to calibrate Prince’s many sides, while also allowing the viewer to luxuriate in the utter genius of his performances. But even as they continued their work, the project was being obstructed by Prince’s estate.

Of the many bafflements of Prince, one of the most haunting is his failure to leave a will. Prince spent years in a burning fury over Warner Brothers’s ownership of his master recordings. Having them restored to him was his great crusade. Two years before he died, a deal was finally worked out, and he got his masters back. In the film, he refers to them as his children. So how could it be that he left no plan for their posterity? Was it the ultimate act of control, a reflection of his distrust of lawyers and contracts? Or was it a final act of abandonment — of himself, of his own work?

After he died, his estate, which was divided among his sister, Tyka, and five half-siblings, was plunged into chaos. When Netflix negotiated the deal for the documentary, a court had placed the estate, which owed millions in back taxes, under the administration of Comerica Bank & Trust. But in 2022, after years of legal battles, a Minnesota court divided Prince’s assets between Primary Wave, a music company to whom three of Prince’s heirs had sold their shares, and Prince Legacy LLC, composed of the other three heirs and L. Londell McMillan, a lawyer who worked with Prince in the 1990s and 2000s, and Charles Spicer, a music producer.

The estate quickly moved to shut Edelman and his team out of the vault, with no explanation, making it even more difficult to finish the film. In the fall of 2022, when several representatives of the estate were shown the first part of the film, which details Prince’s early years, Edelman says they expressed displeasure with its content and tone. (When I asked a representative for Netflix how they responded to the estate’s position, they declined to comment.) Then came another blow: In March 2023, Lisa Nishimura, the Netflix executive who negotiated the original deal and hired Edelman, was laid off after restructuring, a move that shocked the industry and was generally thought to signal a change in Netflix’s strategy. With Nishimura gone, the project lost its most skilled intermediary with the estate and its most powerful internal champion.

Edelman started showing the film to family and friends and to some of the people who had appeared in it. One day in summer 2023, he invited Questlove, the hip-hop artist, music historian and Academy Award-winning filmmaker — and perhaps the world’s No. 1 Prince fan, who serves in the film as one of the chief explicators of his musical innovation — to a daylong screening with several friends in Brooklyn.

By the fourth hour, when I arrived, the room had the distinctive movie-theater musk: popcorn and bodies stewing in emotion. Questlove, sitting in the very front in a black sweatsuit, made his pleasure and pain known. When Susannah Melvoin described how Prince’s personality in bed was the very opposite of his stage persona (“He was very controlled, very shut down”), Questlove bellowed an incredulous expletive. When Morris Hayes, one of Prince’s longtime bandmates, said he encouraged Prince to reconcile with his father — “You only got one dad” — Questlove snapped his fingers in agreement.

You could feel the collective wonder in the room at the end of the penultimate chapter of the film, when Edelman presents the story behind Prince’s famous guitar solo during “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on the night he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. It has been viewed more than 29 million times on YouTube. After Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison have played through most of a reverential rendition of the song, Prince emerges from the wings, in a black suit and a red bowler hat, poker-faced, and plays a solo of such intricacy and mournfulness that the other players shake their heads and grin with admiration. On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura. But the film gives it a new context.

Questlove, on the screen, talks about his disbelief, the previous year, when Rolling Stone made a list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, and Prince was left off it. Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage — at an event associated with Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone — was, in part, an act of revenge. There’s spite and aggression in the performance. But there’s also pain — in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers.

Edelman juxtaposes the first moments of the solo with wisps of the past, calling back to earlier images: Here’s Prince jumping up again to be seen behind his peers; here’s Prince as a baby being held by his mother, and we hear his voice saying, “I ran away when I was 12.” We know, from the sequence before this one, that his parents had recently died. Suddenly, this triumphant performance is given this other dimension of insecurity and insistence in the face of all doubters — the white rock establishment, his uncomprehending parents, the demons in his head. The keening he elicits from the guitar is so plaintive, you want to weep too. A close friend of his later told me that Prince would watch this performance over and over.

Prince died on April 21, 2016, at age 57, of a fentanyl overdose, alone, in an elevator at Paisley Park. His death was presaged in the lyrics of “Let’s Go Crazy” (“Tell me,” he yowls, “are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down? Oh no, let’s go! Let’s go crazy! Let’s get nuts!”), leaving his friends to wonder if he had somehow planned it, fulfilling his own prophecy, orchestrating his mythology until the end. In the final moments of the film, Edelman gives him to us in his glory, sitting at a piano and singing “The Ladder,” a song but also a prayer: “Everybody’s looking for the ladder. Everybody wants salvation of the soul.”

When the screening ended, after midnight, Questlove was shaken. Since he was 7 years old, he said, he had modeled himself on Prince — his fashion, his overflowing creativity, his musical rule-breaking. So “it was a heavy pill to swallow when someone that you put on a pedestal is normal.” That was the bottom line for him: that Prince was both extraordinary and a regular human being who struggled with self-destructiveness and rage. “Everything’s here: He’s a genius, he’s majestical, he’s sexual, he’s flawed, he’s trash, he’s divine, he’s all those things. And, man. Wow.”

I called Questlove a few months later, to see how it had all settled in his mind. He said he went home that night and spoke to his therapist until 3 a.m. He cried so hard he couldn’t see. Watching the film forced him to confront the consequences of putting on a mask of invincibility — a burden that he feels has been imposed on Black people for generations. “A certain level of shield — we could call it masculinity, or coolness: the idea of cool, the mere ideal of cool was invented by Black people to protect themselves in this country,” he said. “But we made it sexy. … We can take dark emotion and make that cool, too. ”The night of the screening, he said he told his therapist, was a wake-up call: “I don’t want my life to be what I just saw there.” It was painful, he said, to “take your hero and subject him to the one thing that he detests more than life, which is to show his heart, show his emotion.” But Questlove feels the film performs a cultural service: a cracking, particularly for Black men, of a facade of invincibility. “No one wants to go first,” he told me, but “for the greater good, for the greater good of mankind and our evolution as human beings, and wanting to be seen as human beings,” he said, “I saw this as a rare, rare, rare chance for us to look human to the world.”

A few weeks after the Brooklyn screening, a cut of the full film was shown to the estate for a factual review. McMillan responded with 17 pages of notes demanding changes. Edelman, wanting to reach a compromise, made some adjustments. But he was adamant that he wouldn’t remove episodes or ideas that felt crucial for the film’s narrative and journalistic cohesion. The estate had demanded, for instance, that he reshoot Paisley Park because they didn’t like the way it looked, or that during the scene depicting Prince’s death, he remove the song “Let’s Go Crazy,” with its lyric about the elevator. They wanted him to take out a part of Wendy Melvoin’s interview, when she talks about Prince’s calling her up after he became more religious to ask her to renounce her homosexuality as a precondition for getting the band back together, and to excise Alan Leeds’ assessment — which was echoed by some critics at the time — that Prince’s 2001 album, “The Rainbow Children,” contained antisemitic lyrics. Edelman refused, insisting that this phase of Prince’s life demanded explanation. How could an artist who talked about freedom and inclusiveness also profess these kinds of beliefs? It wasn’t the entirety of Prince, but it was an important part of his trajectory.

McMillan was intransigent. In the one face-to-face meeting they had, in August 2023, Edelman said that McMillan told him he believed his film would do generational harm to Prince. (Neither McMillan nor Primary Wave responded to multiple interview requests or a detailed list of questions.)

In late spring of this year, the news started to percolate in Hollywood that Edelman’s film might never air. The estate’s attitude about the project seemed to be encapsulated in a July 2024 tweet by Charles Spicer: “We have a duty to honor and protect his legacy with a story that fairly shows his complexities as well as his greatness. #no9hourhitjob.” On Reddit fan threads, rumors abounded that the film was salacious, a takedown. One post, sent to me by a friend of Prince’s who told me it reflected the attitude of the estate, read: “The documentary tears him down and then builds him up. They only do this to our Black heroes. Will they talk about a fight with an ex from 45 years ago when they do Mick Jagger’s or David Bowie’s documentary? Will they talk about drug use or grooming young women? Of course not.”

I discussed this argument with the writer Danyel Smith, former editor of the music magazine Vibe, the author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop” and a contributor to this magazine. Smith has not seen the film, but she told me that while she would never insist on a purely celebratory portrait of a Black icon like Prince, she could understand the feelings of rage and neglect that lie behind that wish. The fact that we rarely see this anatomization of Mick Jagger or Bowie — or for that matter Paul Simon or Paul McCartney — “allows a very traditional white male masculinity to still stand there as a monument of what genius is supposed to look like,” she said. She offered a comparison to George Washington, who was allowed to stand as an unquestioned national hero for centuries before anyone focused on how he “stole dentures from his slaves’ mouths.”

Although the shareholders in the estate claim publicly to have an equal voice, several people who have dealt with them directly say that McMillan is the dominant shaper of strategy and decisions. He has been a lawyer in the music industry for 30 years, and he is known as a canny businessman, who was instrumental in helping Prince get out of his Warner Brothers contract more than two decades ago, though he and Prince were not close in the last years of his life. He is also a polarizing figure whom several people characterized to me as controlling and bullying. Jay-Z famously went after him on his album “4:44″: “I sat down with Prince, eye to eye/He told me his wishes before he died/Now, Londell McMillan, he must be colorblind/They only see green from them purple eyes.” Several people I spoke to said they believe McMillan’s objections come down to a fear that the film will get Prince “canceled” and devalue the estate’s bottom line.

In July, Matthew Belloni reported in his newsletter, “What I’m Hearing,” which is widely read in the industry, that the film was in danger of being shelved. Though Edelman and Netflix retained final cut, Belloni reported, the estate had managed to hold up the project because of a clause in its original contract with Netflix, which stipulates that the film be no more than six hours in length. According to Belloni, Edelman was not willing to truncate it.

The company’s role in all this remains murky. It’s well known in the industry that Netflix executives keep close tabs on their filmmakers, giving ample notes throughout the process, with particular attention to structure. Edelman, so far as I could tell, was encouraged to work on a large canvas, as he did so successfully with his O.J. Simpson film. Given the precision with which he always works, I called Edelman to ask whether the deal he entered into with Netflix specified that the film be limited to six hours; he said he was not at liberty to discuss it. When I put the question to Netflix, the company declined to answer. I had asked an executive who doesn’t work at Netflix but oversees major documentary negotiations how this dispute over length could have happened. The person wondered, “Was there something in the initial negotiation that wasn’t fully communicated to the filmmaking team?”

Cutting a film to six hours from nine hours is not impossible, but it would involve essentially starting the editing process, which took four years, from scratch. Having seen the documentary in its current form, I can say that its length is part of its majesty and fundamental to the claim Edelman is making about Prince’s importance. The novelist Danzy Senna, a friend of Edelman’s who saw the film, told me how moved she was by the length of it. “The bigness of it: Black genius doesn’t get that treatment. We would treat Mozart this way. And this is the kind of mind we’re dealing with — very unusual once-in-a-century kind of brilliant.” Steve James, the director of “Hoop Dreams” and many other award-winning documentaries, also saw the film and extolled its length. “As a viewer, you are asked to grapple in the same way the filmmaker does — with all the complexity of who this guy was. The good, the bad and the ugly. That’s the integrity of the filmmaker, and the completeness of it,” he told me. “You know that what you’re watching is indisputable.”

As word of the project’s dissolution began to spread, a number of executives and filmmakers I spoke with (most of whom requested to remain anonymous, to preserve relationships in the industry) saw Netflix’s failure to protect Edelman’s film as symbolic of discouraging changes in the documentary field. Netflix, which is still the biggest platform for documentaries, has, in recent years, moved away from the kind of prestigious, provocative films that helped make the company’s reputation, toward content that is inexpensive to make and appeals to a global audience. Many people pointed to the platform’s increased appetite for gauzy, entertaining celebrity documentaries — of, for example, Beyoncé, David Beckham, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, all of whom were intimately involved in their creation.

When asked to respond to a list of questions about how the project came apart, a Netflix representative offered the following statement: “This documentary project has proved every bit as complex as Prince himself. We have meticulously archived Prince’s life and worked hard to support Ezra’s series. But there are still meaningful contractual issues with the estate that are holding up a documentary release.” I wrote back to ask if it was possible that Edelman’s film could still come out at some point or whether — as some sources speculated to me could happen — another director might be hired to cut it down to make a version more pleasing to the estate. Netflix declined to comment.

Even as its prospects for release dimmed, Edelman had continued tinkering with the film, refining the score, changing transitions. The people around him often spoke about his maniacal precision and drive, and several of them compared him to Prince. Edelman, too, once told me about the ways he related to his subject. They were each demanding, obsessed with work, insistent on doing things their own way — but at least Prince brought joy to millions of people, Edelman said ruefully. Sometimes Prince’s life appeared to Edelman as a warning. At moments he disliked him intensely, only to find himself moved by Prince’s humanity.

Prince’s sharp angles softened somewhat as he grew older. He had taken on the mantle of elder — championing younger musicians, especially women, whose work he sometimes discovered online. On tour, he became a living, breathing archive of a century’s worth of Black music, which he would play with joyous mastery. At the urging of his friend Cornel West, the academic and activist (and a lively presence in the film), he addressed politics and injustice more directly than he ever had. In the film, we see footage of a concert Prince gave in Baltimore in 2015 after the police killing of Michael Brown and the death of Freddie Gray, where he tells the grieving crowd: “I am your servant this evening. I am your housemaid, and I love each and every one of you.”

In the last months of his life, Prince did a series of lo-fi concerts he called his Piano and a Microphone tour, footage from which forms the spine of the film’s final hours. Prince wears a sparkling purple jumpsuit, his natural hair in a large Afro, the way he wore it when he was first starting out. He sits at the piano, accompanying himself without a band, singing epic ballads like “Sometimes It Snows in April” and “Anna Stesia.” His pyrotechnic performance style has given way to a cindery, gentle one. He speaks to the audience as he never did in his big arena shows, mentioning the loss of old friends, the pain of his childhood, his loneliness. Occasionally, as Scottie Baldwin, his live sound engineer at the time, told Edelman, Prince would leave the stage to cry, drink some tea and go on again. All those years of devotion to performance seem to have peeled something back in him.

In one sequence in the film’s last hour, Prince sings “Free,” a song that he wrote in his 20s, addressed to someone who is having trouble facing the day. “Don’t sleep until the sunrise, listen to the falling rain,” he sings in his caressing falsetto. “Don’t worry ‘bout tomorrow, don’t worry about your pain/don’t cry unless you’re happy, don’t smile unless you’re blue/never let that lonely monster take control of you.” It’s another moment in which Edelman stitches a song together with images from earlier in Prince’s life: Here he is falling to his knees during a performance, doing a victory jig in a powder-blue jumpsuit on the basketball court, kissing Wendy Melvoin onstage, bowing to Mayte Garcia, blowing a big pink bubble and grinning. By now, we know him well: his torment, his competitiveness, his longing for communion and his failure to achieve it. Edelman shows us how deeply all this lives inside this song. “Be glad that you are free,” he cries out in the chorus, “free to change your mind. Free to go most anywhere anytime.”

The purity and virtuosity that Prince reached in these late performances is contrasted with the increasing disorder of his private life. Chronic pain dogged him. Decades of wild, athletic performance — sequences of leaps and twirls and full splits in four-inch high-heeled boots — took their toll. A chorus of voices in the film — Garcia, Wendy Melvoin, Hayes, sound engineers, bodyguards, assistants — testify to his decades-long dependence on pain medication, how it warped his body and his mind, how he quit and relapsed, how it finally killed him.

We see images from Paisley Park taken by investigators after Prince died: his makeup table strewn with spilled bottles, piles of food left to rot in corners, pills scattered on bedspreads, a makeshift bed on the floor of a small internal bedroom — a disturbing echo of his early trauma at the hands of his stepfather. When he died on that elevator, in a box within the box of Paisley Park, he was sealed in, completely alone.

I thought about whether seeing these images amounted to a desecration. Does the whole world need to know about the very private, ugly torments of this genius? But then I registered the dominant sensation the film produced, which was awe. Whatever chaos was unfolding in the corners of Paisley Park, in public Prince alchemized it into singing that was majestic and generative and leapt over walls. The film shows, more movingly and convincingly than almost anything I’ve seen, how life can illuminate art, and yet how separate the two things really are. The bruises and mess of experience are transfigured by the artist into something coherent and whole: a perfect offering.

At the end of his life, several people who knew him told me, Prince was more open, more willing to acknowledge his shortcomings and share aspects of his pain. But he couldn’t get all the way there — couldn’t admit the extent of his dependency on pain pills, couldn’t allow old friends to see him in his suffering, couldn’t make a plan for his legacy. Edelman’s film restores to Prince some of the things he could never achieve for himself. It’s an act of witness and a kind of accompaniment for a lonely musical genius. But through some grim cosmic poetry, it, too, remains locked in the vault.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Correction: Previous versions of this story misstated a lyric from “Let’s Go Crazy.”