Ezra Edelman

They would be turned off.

This is, I think, the big issue here.

I'm like, this is a gift.

A nine-hour treatment about an artist that, like, was, by the way, f***ing brilliant.

Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie.

You get to bathe in his genius.

Yeah.

And yet you also have to confront his humanity, which he, by the way, in some ways was trapped in not being able to expose because he got trapped in his own myth about who he was to the world.

And he, like, had to maintain it.

Jill Jones, who was a Prince protege, a muse, who spent essentially the 80s with him and was someone who was a girlfriend of Prince's, was in the film and to me one of the most truthful voices in the film and was someone who discussed in detail an instance where she was abused by Prince physically.

And by the way, that's not the totality of the story of her with Prince, but like you still see how much she loves him.

Even though she went through an experience with him, that was hard.

Like a decade of her life wanting more, wanting to be an artist that got to do her own album, wanting to be his exclusive girlfriend or the girlfriend when she always was sort of like not that.

It was almost someone, again, when you talk about what it means to be a kept woman or she even, you know, she refers to him as like a pimp.

And like, by the way, this is one side, but this is what she wrote after the news came out about the film being canceled.

Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him.

He built a persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of.

Prince's struggle with drug addiction was deeply intertwined with his relentless pursuit of perfection, an impossible standard he imposed on himself to satisfy a fan base that craved his mystique, his eccentricity, and his ever-evolving artistry.

At his core, he was a consummate people-pleaser, trapped in the expectation to remain an enigma, always surprising, always beyond reach.

The tragedy lies in the fact that so many refused to acknowledge the truth of who he really was.