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.”