“We had labels that would usually be competing against each other actually working with each other, for our cause. Insane. Unheard of. RZA had the plan, but who knew? And, uh, I guess I got lucky. I guess we all did.”

That’s Method Man, a.k.a. Clifford Smith, reflecting on the circumstances of his life, with the distance of decades and an intimacy rarely seen from artists of his generation. He shrugs and nods his head, looking off-camera after the statement, and then sparks a blunt. He’s talking about the unique formulation that allowed the members of Wu-Tang Clan to pursue solo deals with labels other than their home as a group, Loud Records. The moment arrives about halfway through Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, a four-part, four-hour documentary miniseries that begins airing on Showtime on Friday night. It chronicles the rise, reign, and slow dispersal of the most amazing music phenomenon of my lifetime.

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Rappers don’t usually get to be the subject of this sort of prestigious, longform documentary. The Eagles do. Tom Petty, too. I think Bruce Springsteen is on his fifth, and counting. But more than 25 years since their breakthrough single “Protect Ya Neck,” Wu-Tang is due for this sort of august treatment. Worthy, too. The film dedicated to the sprawling and mythologically designed faction that consists of 10 members, dozens of albums, and an unlikely subcultural impact that’s rarely been matched employs all the conventions of a sweeping generational bio-doc: hours of primary source interviews; even more hours of rarely-seen archival footage; awed testimony from collaborators, associates, friends, and other artists inspired by the subject; and a thematic needling tension that bifurcates the film. In parts 1 and 2, we witness the birth and growth of a group whose success seems, in hindsight, to be both inevitable and impossible at the same time. The back half underscores, somewhat erratically, how a collection of artists fiercely united under one flag slowly began to dissolve and establish their own nation-states. It’s a story as arcane and widespread as its group could sometimes seem, and necessarily so.

Of Mics and Men attempts to capture the inner workings of a barnstorming group that became an empire, then devolved into an internecine hive before ultimately returning to a familial détente. Wu-Tang, as an aesthetic, is even more difficult to summarize or paraphrase: Informed by Five Percenter theology, inspired by Hong Kong martial arts films, molded by soul music, raised in ciphers, born in an unlikely cluster of talent. And that barely glances at what constitutes them. For superfans, Sacha Jenkins’s film is a cornucopia of Wu, dotted with anecdotes, soundtracked by beloved songs, and revealing about the intellectual power and emotional vulnerability that made Wu-Tang such an intoxicating force. It’s blunt-force nostalgia. The film opens as the nine living members of the group reconvene at the historic St. George Theatre in their home borough of Staten Island, using the space as a setting to screen scenes from their past. Soon, we’re jetted back to the young years of the RZA, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ghostface Killah, U-God, Masta Killa, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon da Chef, and Meth. (And Cappadonna.) We see ’70s New York, early hip-hop’s influence, and their families. Quickly, the film drills down into their inner selves. I’m not sure I’ve seen hip-hop artists contend so openly and searchingly with the idea of depression. At one point, Ghostface Killah thinks back on his efforts to lift the spirits of his younger brothers as they lived through poverty. In real time, it seems, he realizes how that work had a destructive effect on his own psyche. “I was depressed,” Ghost says, unreservedly. It’s perceptible and still somehow shocking.

The small stories in the film are the most transporting. As the group catches on, we hear, beat-by-beat, how the song “C.R.E.A.M.” was constructed. One night, Raekwon and Inspectah Deck find their way to Firehouse Studios, a Brooklyn hothouse den for Wu circa 1992, and quickly fire off 48 bars for a song originally called “Lifestyles of the Mega-Rich.” Over a mournful sample of the Charmels’ “As Long As I’ve Got You,” chopped and looped by RZA so as to resemble a lonely piano player’s ode to desolation, the song’s lyrics ripple with anger and baleful regret. We hear phrases and rhymes that now feel stitched into rap’s fabric. “I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side.” “The combination made my eyes bleeeeed.” “I’m alive on arrival,” Deck raps, a simple inversion made manifest. But something is missing. RZA, the architect of the group and fulcrum of this film, calls upon his hook-writing secret weapon, Method Man. Meth recalls a letter from a friend in prison in which he signed off with the key acronym—Cash Rules Everything Around Me—a phrase he adopted for the song’s chorus that became a totem for Wu-Tang. In a matter of hours, a song is done and a vibe is born. “C.R.E.A.M.” is desperate and dissolute—a pragmatic anthem. Cash rules everything.

Jenkins is one of the key figures in hip-hop journalism history—a cofounder of Ego Trip magazine and an accomplished writer and filmmaker in his own right. He knows not only the subject, but how to serve up the best copy. Wu-Tang was ubiquitous, but to many fans they seemed to operate in the shadows, elusive and unpredictable. Jenkins routinely draws them out. In small bursts, he uses outside voices—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Seth Rogen, Mobb Deep’s Havoc—to convey wonder and insight about the group. Some see an evocation of their own life on record. Some hear peers elevating. For Rogen, an outsider adopting a culture as a Canadian teenager, he sees a sadness, a vision of pain he hadn’t encountered in rap before.

Though I don’t know why I chose to smoke sess

I guess that’s the time when I’m not depressed

But I’m still depressed, and I ask what’s it worth?

Ready to give up so I seek the Old Earth

Who explained working hard may help you maintain

To learn to overcome the heartaches and pain

Deck’s long, devastating verse closed “C.R.E.A.M.” and also kicked off a wave of success that the group never expected to achieve. RZA and GZA were survivors of stalled rap careers on other labels. Several members had been arrested. All had endured extraordinary pain. Virtually every member is shown to have a complex relationship with their father—some abandoned, others in search of a replacement, others still trying to stay connected. RZA, a.k.a. Robert Diggs, and his brother Mitchell “Divine” Diggs became surrogate parents, creative guardians, and eventually business rivals. The film takes pains to underline RZA’s vision for the group, with interviewees frequently using chess and its board to indicate his wisdom and foresight in moving the various members into positions of success. Of Mics and Men achieves a rare feat in the overcrowded field of music documentary—it makes the structural record-industry elements of the story as compelling as its artistic and emotional underpinnings. “Be as successful as you possibly can—together,” a member remarks at one point. It’s both a mantra and a warning.

I spent 10 years writing, editing, reporting, and obsessing over rap all in search of recapturing that Wu-Tang feeling of discovery. A new Wu-Tang song had the power of a pungent contact high. It could unmoor. It doesn’t expire either. I’ve likely heard Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) more than any other album ever made. I can still conjure a wide-eyed exuberance every time I hear the Shaolin and Wu-Tang dialogue and every time that Melvin Bliss breakbeat hits on “Bring da Ruckus.” It isn’t a song anymore; it’s a wormhole. Hearing the group’s songs could be a portal to understanding pain, exultation, wisdom, comedy, taste. Over time, Wu-Tang became shorthand for other things: bloat, anxiety, tragedy, delays. (I’ve waited longer and later for Wu-affiliated concert performances than any other artist, and it’s not close.)

For a period that essentially covered the entire ’90s, the group was arguably the most influential and sui generis artists of their time. RZA imagined the Wu as a way of life. On your person, on your turntable, on your brain. He couldn’t have imagined how deeply it would run. I can feel their influence in my life all over. In the way I’m drawn to mythologies and the people who know more about them than I do. In the way I try to make my own nostalgia viable. In the way I’ve sought to work with my friends, to connect their creativity to my own. In the way I can see spirituality and wisdom sitting comfortably beside ignorant shit.

From 1993 through 2000, the group and its members released 20 albums, at least 10 of which can reasonably be called classic, five of which are iconic, and a couple that changed hip-hop irreversibly. Wu-Tang fell victim to—but also perfected—the pitfalls of life after breakthrough success: the fascinating but bloated double-album follow-up. A lavish million-dollar video. Legal troubles. An over-expanding empire. Fractious relationships. A subtle breakup. And the tragic death of a member.

Of Mics and Men is probably the most elegantly told and worthwhile portrait of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a.k.a. Rusty Jones, the irascible, pulsing heart of the Wu, that I’ve seen. By turns frenetic and open-hearted, rambunctious and inspired, ODB was often portrayed in his time as the Wu’s court jester, an unpredictable force seeking some inscrutable object. He was more than that—not just a dynamic vessel for RZA’s musical vision, but an ecstatically spiritual type. He sang with a weird broken ferocity that was one part Teddy Pendergrass and one part Tom Waits. Jenkins spends a long portion of the series’ third part revealing how ODB’s roughly two-year prison stint in the early 2000s became emblematic of the group’s fracturing. At conception, Divine and RZA built companies around the Wu’s members, signing them to production and licensing deals, essentially controlling their artistic and financial fates. When members asked out of those contracts, RZA encouraged his older brother to free them, relinquishing what we’re told are millions of dollars of potential earnings. Divine emerges here as the heavy of the Wu saga, a tenacious businessman who sold crack to bankroll the group’s earliest work and ultimately rose to chief executive of its conglomeration. (At one point, we learn that the clothing line Wu Wear’s flagship store on Victory Boulevard earned $5 million in its first year, and the line eventually raked in annual grosses as high as $30 million.) When ODB is released from prison in 2003, RZA and Divine buck against his desire to be released from his Wu-Tang contract, and the film takes on a Rashomonlike shape. Diverging testimony across all members is intercut with footage of ODB in 2003, baffled by what he perceives as a betrayal by his longtime creative partners and real-life cousins. Why RZA insists upon keeping ODB under contract and his own professional care is never quite made clear. It’s a lasting pain point, an unhealed wound. If all this sounds like a Shakespearean family epic, that’s because it is.

A long stretch of the film also examines a tour with Rage Against the Machine billed as a crossover moment, and the subsequent ban from New York radio station Hot 97 after a defiant performance at its annual Summer Jam. Both events seem to affect the group irrevocably, tearing rifts in their relationships. The members seem to become more ornery and dissatisfied as the film continues. The final chapter is largely oriented around Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a 2015 album art piece, its controversial recording, and even more controversial sale at auction to the now-imprisoned pharmaceutical drug crook Martin Shkreli. What starts out resembling the sort of lumpy, customary “Here’s the promo for our new project!” final segment of so many music docs soon transforms into a scam-artist adventure built around the producer and longtime RZA disciple Cilvaringz. It’s an odd but oddly fitting end to the story of a group without precedent. When Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was being made, its members didn’t realize what they’d signed up for, or where it could lead. The same could have been said when the Wu-Tang Clan first formed. The beginning is the end. Watch your step, kid.