Movie Nation

In April the weather should be warm enough to make this Antarctic (and Arctic) true story endurable.

Norway’s greatest modern hero gets a bio pic that Samuel Goldwyn’s releasing in the US.

Scan your memory banks and run through the legions of YA sci-fi adaptations that have made it to the screen. Try and conjure up a sliding scale, say “Hunger Games” to “The Giver” or “Ender’s Game” or “City of Ember” or the later “Divergents” or “Maze Runners” and on and on.

I was stunned, during the middle of Hollywood’s “Find me the next ‘Hunger Games'” hunt, at how many were more or less unwatchable, and how all of them were forgettable.

“Chaos Walking,” based on a Patrick Ness novel, directed by Doug Liman (“Edge of Tomorrow”), finished and labeled “unreleaseable,” reshot by Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) is now perfectly watchable, if doomed to be forgettable.

Whatever it began life as it arrives as a parable on toxic masculinity, set as it is in a culture where men can’t keep themselves from “saying the silent part out loud.” That’s topical, damning, and in the film (and source novel’s) conceits, kind of funny.

Casting Spider Man-boy Tom Holland makes this work. As a babbling 20ish “settler” on “New World,” a planet generations removed from Earth (a 64 year journey away), Holland plays a variation of his chatty, insecure but good-hearted Peter Parker, a guy who helps the sole survivor of a “second wave” colonial scout ship escape The Patriarchy.

As she’s played by Daisy Ridley of the recent “Star Wars” trilogy, there’s a just hint here and there that maybe she could that on her own.

Holland is “Todd Hewitt,” a name he repeats in his head ad nauseum as a way to “control the noise.” That’s what they call the errant thoughts that every man there spews into the ether. A clever touch? The “thoughts” look like a vaping chain-smoker, with flashbacks and visualizations of what might be projected onto them. The planet causes this.

“Control your noise” well enough and you can keep “secrets,” which no man on this planet can manage all that well. Control it and you can project threats — giant snakes — or traps (imagined fences springing up around a quarry) into the minds of your foes.

Todd is the youngest lad in Prentiss Town, named for the smooth-talking, mind-controlling Mayor (Mads Mikkelsen). The Mayor keeps their history, tells and retells the story of how the native inhabitants of the planet “murdered all the women.”

But when a scout ship crash lands near Todd and the farm of his two dads (Demián Bichir, Kurt Sutter) who raised him, and this young woman (Ridley) is the sole survivor, the mayor can’t hide his intentions.

Todd and the young woman must flee.

The Québec locations give this world of entropy a 19th century Pacific Northwest as it was first being settled feel. It’s a world of farming and fur hunting and “be a man,” as Todd has to remind himself constantly. It looks lived-in, a society that has devolved as its technology broke or the batteries gave out, back on horseback because the ark they arrived on brought them (and dogs like Todd’s Toto-ish Manchee) along with the people and Big Plans.

The core plot elements are cut-and-paste YA dystopia — a quest with villains in hot pursuit, chased on horseback, shot at, rivers to cross and a goal line that seems to move further away despite the best efforts of our intrepid young heroes.

But they get maximum mileage out of the core gimmick, the fact that men can’t hide their thoughts from anyone, and women can. Holland’s Todd thinks/speaks “yellow hair, pretty,” and blurts out “Please ignore that” to “the girl” who has never been on terra firma, born on the space ark that brought her here.

“The civilizing influence of women” may be a trite, tired trope, but Todd embodies this and is as prone to violence as every other man there.

And the villains are first rate. Mikkelsen has a simmering menace, and David Olyelowo, who once played Martin Luther King Jr. (“Selma”) takes sexist religion to its violent, patriarchal extreme — madness — as “The Preacher,” a man expecting “retribution” for the lives they’ve lived, the lies they tell and the crimes that must have been part of that.

No, you won’t remember this a year from now — just the vapor-thoughts effect, the jokey tone that floats around that and the heroes and villains. But how much of “The Hunger Games” sticks in the memory after four films? Heroes, villains, the train and a bow and arrow? Maybe?

MPA Rating:PG-13 for violence and language

Cast: Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, David Oyelowo, Demián Bichir, Nick Jonas, Cynthia Erivo and Mads Mikkelsen

Credits: Directed by Doug Liman, script by Patrick Ness and Christopher Ford, based on a novel by Patrick Ness. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:49

“Fresh off the Boat” author and producer Eddie Huang makes his feature filmmaking debut with “Boogie,” a fresh and feisty sports dramedy that takes movie formulas and cultural tropes out for a spin.

Sports movie formula? It’s all about “the Big Game” and getting a basketball scholarship. Only that benchmark scene is defanged, knocked off its axis.

Over-achieving Asian immigrants? Our hero, winningly played by Taylor Takahashi, has screaming, brawling parents who guilt him to paper over their own shortcomings. Mom (Pamelyn Chee, scary) is an inept, manipulative control freak and Dad (Perry Yung) has never been more than a town car “limo” driver, partly due to his explosive temper.

Every hint of “a tradition in our culture” that they trot out is “playing the China card.” The film is framed within a flashback of the bickering couple’s pregnant visit to a fortune teller, whose inscrutable advice is laughable, all things considered.

“Love will melt the sharpest sword.” What happens when there is no love, more a partnership?

A key scene is a ritual. Boogie — real name Alfred Chin — sits with his father for yet another viewing of “the greatest moment in Chinese American history,” Michael Chang’s win over Ivan Lendl in the 1989 French Open.

The kid trots out better “greatest” exemplars. NBA hero Jeremy Lin? “He gave the credit to JESUS.” The kid echoes this to friends, “model minority Jesus freak.”

Maya Lin? Yeah, maybe. She was 21 when designed the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

Dad is supportive but sanguine about the family “plan” — get Boogie, a brawny guard — from high school to the NBA.

“No one believes in an Asian basketball player,” Dad grouses. “We can cook, clean, count real good. Anything else? We’re picked last.”

With scenes like that Huang takes us into a world that feels lived-in and lives that show strain under the weight they carry. Boogie has game, swagger, a mouth and a temper. He’s transferred to City Prep and can turn their “trash team” into winners — if he can learn to play well with others, control his temper and tone down the mouthiness. Heaven knows this ABC (American born Chinese) is going to be reminded of “what we went through” to put you here by his parents. Every damn day.

But his patter might be a help when he swoons into his first big crush. Classmate Eleanor (Taylour Paige of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) is all dreads and eyes and attitude and doesn’t mess around with “ballers.” But she notices the attention.

“He could get it if he stopped STARING.”

Boogie? “I feel like a left-handed layup right now.” Yup. We’ve seen him take them them on the court. He uses his right hand. Big hole in his game, and he knows it and recognizes Eleanor as the same hopeless challenge.

Huang turns their courtship into something young and lightly charming, and their “first time” into lowdown comedy.

That’s the kind of movie “Boogie” is and has to be. Because as “the plan” keeps going off the rails and the biggest challenge looms like a date with a great Black shark. Someday, Boogie will be tested by Monk, the playground courts legend and high school brute who owns this game in its Mecca, New York City.

The Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke (Bashar Barakah Jackson) makes a startling debut as the “best baller in the five boroughs” villain, a bullying b-ball machine on the court. Sadly, that’ll be the only impression he leaves in the movies, as he was murdered in Feb. just before “Boogie” came out.

Huang keeps this world and its problems and complications real as the third act devolves into twists and intrigues we don’t see coming.

And he keeps the dialogue flip and funny, with Boogie upending expectations at every turn. A walk through Chinatown has him turning up his nose at “these ‘Gremlins’ keepers” and woos his lady friend with dates that include a Tai Chi stop, and dominoes, because “I just like countin’ em up.”

“That’s the most Chinese s— you’ve ever said!”

We root for them and pull for Boogie. And every time we figure we know how this will turn out because we’ve seen 74 earlier versions of “this movie,” Huang trips us up.

His flawed hero, more flawed parents and pipe dreams become our dreams, which “Big Game” or not, is all we could hope for in any sports dramedy.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout including sexual references, and some drug use 

Cast: Taylor Takahashi, Taylour Paige, Pamelyn Chee, Perry Yung, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Mike Moh, Domenick Lombardozzi and Pop Smoke.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Eddie Huang. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:29

The title character is never on camera in “Rain Beau’s End,” the most interesting choice in this seasons-in-a-gay-relationship melodrama.

Imagine “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” the searing, seminal 2011 drama about a family overwhelmed by a son whose violent streak and self-control issues reach a crisis, without any sign of Kevin. Lacking the presence of the supposed cause in all the stress in this couple is a palpable absence that the viewer feels, and frankly one the two leading ladies sense as well.

There’s a lot of under-reacting to violent, on-the-spectrum tantrums, lashing out and seriously disturbing behavior mentioned over the film’s two decades or so of personal history.

“Beau,” a boy the gay couple Hannah (Janelle Snow) and Jules (Amanda Powell) adopt at age four, is an eagerly-awaited completion of their dream of “family.” But Hannah, a successful lawyer, is running for mayor in their suburban Chicago town, and Jules has a coffee shop — Sappho’s Cafe — to run.

A friend doesn’t have to be a prophet to wonder “how they’ll have time” to raise a child.”

There’s even a press scrum when the two women go to pick the kid up in the mid-90s, when gay women adopting a boy would be “news.” A right wing columnist lashes out.

And all that comes before they endure Beau’s first blasts of “acting out,” before the first injuries he causes before the violence he almost does to a pet and before his therapist (Andrea Salloum) has him tested and gives them a diagnosis.

Not ADD or anything most of us have ever heard of. “Jacob’s Syndrome.” He will require lifetime of attention, therapy, but “no medication” holistic “Namaste Jules” (her nickname) insists.

Tracy Wren’s film of Jennifer Cooney’s script takes us through the ups and downs brought to the relationship by this unseen and frankly undersold threat to their happiness. As Hannah and Jules, our “Chicago Med” and “Chicago P.D.” leads find each other with fresh bruises, are visited by a school principal at his wit’s end and a cop detailing Beau’s — Jules wants to call him “Rain Beau” — latest violation of public order or school policy.

They describe a nightmare, differ in how they think they should deal with his issues, lightly bicker and move on.

The effect is a serious softening of the body blows this kid is giving them psychically and physically, and we feel it in the leads’ drained performances. Hannah and Jules are rationalizing, denying, avoiding and not really grappling with the fact that they can’t “fix” him or “turn him in for a better one.”

A reasonable person would be a frazzled, nervous wreck. They just go about their days, sip wine and gripe to their mostly-gay friends, who wonder when “you’ll get your life back.”

The kid’s a handful, and I just don’t get that here. It doesn’t help that all these conversations are staged in a deathly-quiet house. A lot of simple tricks would get across that tension and put the viewer on tenterhooks with them — noise, a room being tossed or a kid screaming in fury. Even if you don’t see him, that would seem more accurate and put the viewer right there on harrowing edge with the two moms.

It’s as if Beau is some sort of distraction that even Jules, the supposedly more involved one, isn’t commited to focusing on. The mayor can barely be bothered, “He needs love” falls on deaf ears.

“Do for you,” Hannah’s law partner (Sean Young) grouses. “When you do for others, the pain isn’t worth it.”

Needless to say, nobody involved with “Beau” would want us to extrapolate this into a representation of gay parenting.

Young and Ed Asner (Hannah’s not-quite-estranged homophobic dad) sparkle in small roles. And the film can leave you feeling that you’ve watched something more substantial you have thanks to contrived ending.

But it’s the one role that wasn’t cast that hamstrings “Rain Beau’s End,” a melodrama with an emotional finale that feels like a cheat at the end of a story where the “problem child” feels like an inconvenient afterthought.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Janelle Snow, Amanda Powell, Andrea Salloum, Sean Young and Ed Asner

Credits: Directed by Tracy Wren, script by Jennifer Cooney. A LesFlicks release.

Running time: 1:43

A multi generational journey across goes wrong in this April release.

In adapting the novel “Moxie” into a film, Amy Poehler takes a stab at a generation-defining teen comedy like “Mean Girls,” the one her BFF Tina Fey wrote.

It’s an of-its moment movie, hip and flip and “Woke” with a capital “W.” “Moxie” is less comic and more ambitious than “Mean Girls,” which leads it into darker places and a little length-padding mission creep.

But its still an uplifting celebration of Gen Z female empowerment, a nice little pat on the back for Poehler’s own Generation X and big step up from her directing debut, “Wine Country.”

Hadley Robinson plays Vivian, who starts her junior year at Oregon’s Rockport High School with purpose — get admitted into Cal — and a best friend, her fellow “INTJ” (introvert), Claudia (Lauren Tsai).

They show up at school, eagerly awaiting and half-dreading the publication of “The List.” That’s a rating system cooked up by unknown jocks and bros that labels classmates “Designated Drunk,” “Best Ass,” “Most Bangable” and the like.

But by the time this list is texted, en masse, to the entire student body, Vivian’s had her eyes opened. The bluff bullying of entitled star jock Mitchell Wilson (Patrick Schwarzenegger, perfectly loathsome) has crossed into “dangerous” harassment which new girl Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Pena, terrific) isn’t having.

Reporting this to their Baby Boomer principal (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden) gets a boys-will-be-boys response, and “that word (harassment) — it means I have to do…a whole lot of stuff.” Principal Shelly is all about students with “moxie,” who let stuff like this roll off their backs.

Like that works with bullies — ever.

Lucy is black and already woke. Vivian wakes up herself, takes the Riot Grrrl recollections of her still-tattooed divorced mom (Poehler) to heart, and starts a secret “Zine.” She draws, clips out photos Old School, literally cutting-and-pasting the artwork together — as if any kid today wouldn’t do that all on a smart phone — gets it photocopied and spreads it around the school.

“Moxie” catches on, and together with some outspoken soccer girls, a “dress code” victim and a trans girl looking for acknowledgement, a movement is made and a “revolution” at this toxic school begins.

The English teacher (Ike Barinholtz) quickly learns that he can’t sit this one out.

“If you’re doing nothing,” he’s lectured, “then you’re part of the problem.”

And the only person to figure out that Vivian is behind all this is “not a shrimp anymore” boy-ally, Seth (Nico Hiraga of “Booksmart”). She’s giving skateboarder Seth the eye, and he’s giving it back.

“Secret identities are objectively rad.”

“Moxie” charts a revolution from its birth to the points where “it goes too far,” “blowback” and beyond and delivers positive messaging pretty much all along the way.

It’s a high school comedy that hits all the waypoints of such movies — “Big Party,” “First Boyfriend,” pep rallies and conflict with parents. But there are more uplifting moments than funny ones, and that’s by design. And the film’s turn toward the dark side may be defensible, but stops it cold.

“By design” also gets entirely too close to “on-the-nose” for its own good. The students of color are the first to see the problem and embrace the solution. The schism that opens between Vivian and pal Claudia has “Tiger Mom” stereotyping, and the mother-daughter conflict that Vivian and mother Lisa fall into feels contrived.

The entire affair seems pre-digested and somewhat “sanitized for your protection.”

Robinson (“Little Women”) pleasantly embodies that “nice girl next door” spectrum that Vivian falls on, a perfectly acceptable tour guide for One Teen’s Journey to Feminism. But few of the performances really pop, and that goes back to the screenplay created from Jennifer Mathieu’s novel. You wish it was wittier.

It’s still an intensely likable and watchable dramedy, even if it never quite reaches that “generation defining comedy” thing.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for thematic elements, strong language and sexual material, and some teen drinking 

Cast: Hadley Robinson, Lauren Tsai, Alycia Pascual-Pena, Amy Poehler, Nico Hiraga, Ike Barinholtz, and Clark Gregg.

Credits: Directed by Amy Poehler, script by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer, based on the novel by Jennifer Mathieu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

“Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness” is a riveting and thoroughly engrossing satire of Iranian culture and the work-arounds built into a theocracy, ways of ignoring calls for reform and the shedding of “tradition.”

Tehran filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi’s Sundance-honored second feature is an international production whose puzzles begin with the alien culture he immerses us in and ends with “Wait, Iran let him get away with that?”

“Yalda” is about patriarchy, “temporary marriage,” an “apology culture” that’s become embedded in Sharia law and the legal system and the entrenched “eye for an eye” and “blood money” side of that justice system.

And it’s about a (fictional) TV show, “Joy of Forgiveness,” where the condemned can get legally-binding “forgiveness” via a live on-air apology to the injured party or their family.

The film is set in real time as that show’s producer (Babak Karimi), crew and host (Arman Darvish) frantically prep for and then broadcast their Yalda (a Winter’s Solstice holiday) episode.

There are many moving parts that have to fall into place, a lot of people to placate and masters to serve on this show, which has a musical guest, an in-show lottery, a text-in reality TV poll element and its dramatic main event, a live, Jerry Springer-style (but well-mannered) confrontation.

Producer Ayat (Karimi) has an in-control-room censor from the State, a woman who objects to how downbeat and depressing this holiday episode is. Ayat has to get a condemned woman (Sadaf Asgari), the night’s star, to the studio from prison. He’s scrambling to ensure that the woman whom that condemned “star” wronged (Behnaz Jafari), someone who may not want to accept an apology or even participate, shows up. Tonight’s special guest, an Iranian film star, has to be accommodated for her appearance where she’ll read a poem appropriate to the holiday and “forgiveness.”

But Maryam (Asgari) is young, desperate and hellbent on telling her “truth” to the live audience and the woman who will be sitting opposite her. She denies the crime, that she “murdered” Mona’s father, even though she was convicted and sentenced to the gallows. Her manic mother arranged this TV pardon, but Maryam demands “Let me speak for MYSELF!”

Ayat tries to talk her down (in Persian with English subtitles). But dammit, woman, this is TELEVISION.

“You can ruin your life if you want, but I won’t let you ruin my show.”

When Mona (Jafari) shows up, Ayat won’t let Maryam meet her and re-plead her case. He’s keeping this confrontation on set and fresh for his audience.

It’s just that with live TV, with a near-hysterical condemned woman facing a stone-faced, unforgiving daughter, things are sure to go wrong. And this story, unfolding in 89 tightrope-walking minutes, reveals a complicated familial connection, hidden agendas and the cruelty of the patriarchal power imbalance between Mona’s wealthy father and the much-younger woman he (and Maryam’s mother) talked into a “temporary marriage.”

When Westerners get worked-up over the traditions and sexist loopholes of the Muslim world and Sharia law, things like that — a short term “arrangement” for a man who doesn’t want to commit to a woman, to create offspring with her or be charged with soliciting prostitution — are what they point to.

Bakhshi, whose feature debut was”A Respectable Family,” bends reality just enough to make this satire sting. He takes an outsider-looking-in peek at how Iranian justice looks to the outside world and serves up a movie that plays as “Network” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Ayat’s slick, modern Western-style show, with its woman director and gender-mixed crew, goes off the rails during the confrontation and “show more commercials” isn’t enough of a stall. “Let’s have another song.”

“We don’t have PERMITS for that,” his censor barks. Wait. What?

The on-camera pressure on both women — Maryam feels showing clips of her trial and the crime being reenacted are “humiliating,” Mona’s stubbornness faces commercial-break arm-twisting — mounts as the plot twists on this secret or that veiled threat.

“Yalda” exposes a messy system where the weakest elements of a theocratic patriarchy are vulnerable to a sexist unbalancing of the scales of justice and subject to public shaming. But damn, it makes for fascinating television and a movie that will pull you in, first scene to its harrowing finale.

MPA Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Arman Darvish

Credits: Scripted and directed by Massoud Bakhshi. A Film Movement release

Running time: 1:29

“Sometime Other Than Now” is a soft-spoken indie romance about the endless reservoir of forgiveness that is woman. Or at least the movie myth version.

Kate Walsh of “Grey’s Anatomy” plays one. Trieste Kelly Dunn is another. And young Alexa Swinton plays a forgiveness apprentice in this thin tale of a grizzled, soulful biker who comes to a tiny New England coastal town with a heavy heart and an itch to leave.

Donal Logue of “Gotham” is Sam, a guy we meet just as the surf is about to wash up over him and the motorcycle which he drove off the road some time before. We are intrigued.

Long-haired, beared and 50something, he is “the mystery man,” the “enigmatic drifter” who has to get the bike fixed, who ducks into the Sunset Motel & Cafe and catches the eye of proprietor Kate (Walsh).

He might be interested, might be frightened of the prospect. Something about this town (Greenport, NY is a location, despite the Massachusetts plates) has him jumpy.

She isn’t really interested, “No no no,” she says. Until her blind date — a lawyer — sits while Sam gets up to silently intervene as a guy loudly bullies his now-ex girlfriend waitress at a local restaurant.

Kate and Sam’s moments together, on the beach, cafe or wherever, have an artificial awkwardness about them. A lot of “It’s none of my business” and “Would you like to?” left hanging in their empty conversations.

As he’s a got the silent thing going, and is unkempt and tattooed and she used to be a Boston lawyer, you have to wonder what, other than the requirements of the screenplay, will pair them up?

But as they do, as she declares a post-coital “the whole mystery man thing, the whole enigmatic drifter thing, that’s over now,” we start learn why he’s here and in such discomfort.

Every screen story is contrived, so sure, his motorcycle is always “waiting for parts” and “maybe tomorrow, for sure,” keeping Sam around. There’s always an aw shucks local (P.J. Marshall) who might be sweet on Kate, but being a mechanic figures she’s even more out of his league.

He accepts that even after he gets a clue about who she’s taking up with instead of him.

Walsh slips into this part with ease, a woman with her own past and of some accomplishment, half-swooning over the first guy who can fix a leak, a hinge or lightbulb at her tiny motel.

Logue can be charming, but this script leaves Sam with nothing but “damaged” and “withdrawn” and guilt-ridden.

As much as I like the cast and the laid back setting, writer-director Dylan McCormick (“Four Lane Highway”) finds little to do with either. And nothing that he cooks up is the least bit surprising, even the illogical leaps that suggest that larger theme — that women will forgive an awful lot.

Which in Sam’s case, they do. No matter what he does or has done.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, some nudity

Cast: Kate Walsh, Donal Logue, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Amy Hargreaves

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dylan McCormick. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:30

Sean “Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy” Combs lays out the mission statement for this new documentary about The Notorious B.I.G. right before the opening credits.

“This story doesn’t have to have a tragic ending.”

What follows in “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell,” is an adoring, seriously upbeat portrait of New York rap icon Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, a film built around his literal family — his widow, mother and Jamaican grandmother — and the “Junior Mafia” crew of rappers, hype men and friends from his entourage.

The guy was murdered at 24 in Los Angeles in a crime that remains unsolved 24 years later. But that tale is for another movie, earlier docs (starting with “Biggie & Tupac”) and documentaries to come.

If it accomplishes nothing else, and it does, Emmett Malloy’s new film tears Biggie away from Tupac Shakur, his friend and later hip hop rival and fellow unsolved murder victim. In separating them and their shared fates, that infamous “feud” is given the play it probably deserves — all “drama” on gangsta-wannabe Tupac’s side.

Biggie? He was selling drugs on street corners, as he was quick to remind folks, right around the time Tupac was finishing the ballet classes his momma put him in.

Malloy, who directed “Tribes of Palos Verdes” and various music videos and music docs for The White Stripes, Jack Johnson, etc., builds the film around the hours of home movies, studio recordings and onstage material recorded by Wallace’s lifelong friend and videographer D Roc. And he interviews D Roc, Wallace’s mother, grandmother and widow, P. Diddy and a lot of people who were a part of Biggie’s orbit growing up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, many of whom stuck with him as he became famous.

Diddy is here for the hype, his greatest discovery, “the greatest rapper of all time, and I was saying that when he was alive.”

D Roc and many of the others are here to separate the man from the image. Christopher, which is what his Jamaican-born school-teacher mother Voletta called him all his life, “was a conscious person. He knew what was going on” and kept friends and family close, D Roc says. But “Notorious B.I.G.? He didn’t give a f–k.”

That isn’t a knock, just a way of separating the verbally dexterous born “entrepreneur” from the image he conjured up. As a teen, Christopher sold crack on the street corners of his neighborhood, Bed Stuy and environs. And he oversold that image later. His rap career took off so young that his street-selling days were more days than years.

Because as grainy home videos make obvious, his Jamaican background and connection to musicians like his Uncle Dave Wallace back in Jamaica (which Christopher visited several times) and jazz sax player Donald Harrison (a neighbor) gave him a musical edge when it came to making his mark rhyming.

A Catholic schoolboy exposed to Jamaican slang and rhythms, “an R & B writer and singer who became a rapper,” as Diddy puts it, a shy kid who expressed himself in rhyming rap battles before becoming “The King of New York,” he was soaring in popularity right up to the moment he was gunned down in traffic, right at his peak.

The film’s focus on the positive leaves little room for getting at anything truly negative. And when you die at 24, there’s truthfully not a lot of that to “report.” The “feud” and the list of his potential murderers, many of whom carried alleged beefs with Biggie, is where that material lies and it’s mostly missing.

The most fascinating content here is hearing his mother’s ambitions — a desire to come to America and “get rich”– and Wallace’s myriad musical influences, not just his pals and peers but those father figure mentors who entered his life.

Being just a gloss on his life, we don’t pick up on the appetites and genetics that made him 6’2″ and 375 pounds. No “father” is so much as mentioned.

But his friends and family remind us how much he was loved by those closest to him, and competing New York TV helicopter crews filming his funeral cortege back in March of 1997, streets filled with cheering-not-weeping fans, show us emphatically that they were not alone.

MPA Rating: R, drug content, profanity

Cast: Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, Voletta Wallace, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, D Roc, Faith Evans, Matty C., Donald Harrison, Lil Cease

Credits: Directed by Emmett Malloy, script by Sam Sweet. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37