Director Allen Hughes has evolved into a deft and imaginative documentarian, just the latest pleasant surprise in a long, eclectic career. His best-known films are the scripted fare he co-directed …
and his mother Afeni Shakur. The tone is quite different — more elegiac than exhilarating — but fitting for a posthumous celebration of Afeni, who died in 2016, just months shy of the 30th anniversary of Tupac’s unsettling death in a drive-by shooting. Combining their lives into a single docuseries creates an experience far greater than the sum of its parts. Beyond its intimate and nuanced portrayal of their relationship, “Dear Mama” miniaturizes a huge swath of Black life without diluting it.
The first episode is dominated by Tupac, beginning with the night of his death, working its way back to his youth, and delving into his continued global legacy. The series of events leading up to the fatal shooting began with a fist fight in a Las Vegas casino, Tupac’s act of retaliation against a man accused of robbing his friend. Hughes argues, using interviews with Pac’s friends, family and collaborators, that Tupac was essentially driven by a desire to protect people who had been wronged.
That’s a quality Tupac inherited from Afeni, to whom he paid tribute in the song the docuseries is named after. Afeni was a vocal and visible member of the Black Panther Party, and her son shared the same inclination toward counterculture that informed his early, commentary-laden songs. After Tupac joined the infamous Death Row Records , Afeni finds herself less and less able to recognize her son.
The series moves at a breakneck speed, but Hughes’ impressionistic visuals and more-is-more approach to sound design justifies that. “Dear Mama” is similar to looking at a Shakur family photo album through a microscope and a kaleidoscope at the same time. While Hughes occasionally indulges in genre tropes — if someone asks for a break to cry and compose themselves, that request will always make the cut — “Dear Mama” is incisive and inventive enough to extend his intriguing second act.
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