A Teen Filmed Ye for Years. This Is the Result

A teen named Nico Ballesteros entered Kanye West's orbit in 2016. Then a student at Orange County School of the Arts, he offered to film Ye's events. Two years later, Ye gave Ballesteros full access. The now-26-year-old quietly ended up capturing over 3,000 highly personal and private hours of Ye's increasingly tumultuous life. The result of all that filming is now public: The documentary In Whose Name offers an unfiltered look at Ye's highly publicized controversies, including his "White Lives Matter" fashion show, his public battle with bipolar disorder, and his series of business and personal implosions, among them his marriage to Kim Kardashian.

Writing for the Guardian, Adrian Horton reports the film "follows in the mold of verité documentaries—no talking heads, no narration, an unvarnished single timeline, albeit an unfathomably busy and starry one." Busy indeed. Ballesteros kept pace with Ye, sleeping roughly four hours a night and, in the span of a single week in 2018, hitting up the White House, Uganda, Los Angeles, Big Sur, Chicago, and Basel, Switzerland, with the rapper—who Ballesteros says always treated him well.

In an interview with Vulture, Ballesteros says Ye initially contemplated trying to get A-listers like Spike Jonze and Werner Herzog to film him. "But I don't think this format could have existed without it being someone who was a kid," says Ballesteros. "It required a level of naïveté and also availableness." (And a willingness to do it without pay, he notes to the Hollywood Reporter.) Ballesteros maintains that, despite his youth, he aimed to uphold journalistic integrity, keeping his own opinions out of the frame and noting that Ye had no editorial control over the final product. Ballesteros says, "I wanted to create a study of the human, not the idol." What are the critics saying?

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• At Variety, Steven J. Horowitz writes that "there isn't much of a throughline ... other than [the film's] linearity. ... On its face, the doc maintains its momentum merely based on access ... yet the film as a whole is as tedious and frustrating as West himself."
• At the Guardian, Horton finds that "the most fascinating observation is not Ye's grim descent into rightwing nihilism, but how everyone around him barely reacts. Ballesteros films Ye in what seems to be constant contact with the uber-rich, powerful, and provocative: Elon Musk, Jacques Herzog, Donald Trump, Drake, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens—all of them overly obsequious, none of them challenging his ego, save Swizz Beatz and a clearly heartbroken Michael Che, post 2018 SNL meltdown."