Review: â€˜Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell’ reveals another side of the late Notorious B.I.G.

The hip-hop artist known as the Notorious B.I.G. was tagged back in the mid-’90s as a “gangsta rapper.� But the people who knew him best remember him more as a musical explorer and a phenomenal live performer, who — if he hadn’t been killed at age 24 — might’ve eventually transcended any genre, fusing hip-hop, vintage soul, cutting-edge pop, rock, country and more. Beneath his imposing surface, Christopher “Biggie Smalls� Wallace had a lot of interests, and a lot on his mind.

The goal of the Netflix documentary “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell� is to change some of the conventional wisdom on Wallace, moving beyond his semiautobiographical tales of crime and cash. Director Emmett Malloy has interviews with a lot of Biggie’s oldest friends, along with rare home video footage of him as a teenager. What emerges from the film is a portrait of an artist who was always honest about his life on the streets — but who ultimately was perhaps too defined by what he did to make money when he was a kid.

One of the best creative choices Malloy makes is to cut occasionally to an animated map of New York City, showing the boundaries of the young Wallace’s world. Raised by a single mother — a Jamaican immigrant who worked as a schoolteacher — Wallace spent most of his time as a boy hanging out on just a few blocks in Brooklyn, including an infamous street run by drug dealers.

While he and his friends were selling crack as teenagers, Wallace was also obsessing over hip-hop, honing a lyrical flow that struck anyone who heard it as incredibly advanced, with its internal rhymes and repetition. As soon as he started recording, he was a star, renowned for the fatalistic frankness of his songs about drugs, violence and thwarted dreams. The Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 debut album “Ready to Die� became an instant classic.

Because Malloy covers so much of the lesser-known part of Biggie’s story, he falls a bit short when setting up the final two years of the rapper’s life. There’s a lot of talk about what set Wallace’s early songs apart, but not as much analysis of why “Ready to Die� connected so quickly. And the beef between East Coast and West Coast rappers that eventually led to Biggie’s shooting gets only brief, sketchy coverage here.

This seems to be a conscious choice on Malloy’s part, to minimize the tragic falling-out between the Notorious B.I.G. and the hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur — a story told many times before in other documentaries and dramatizations.

Instead, this movie is less about the myth of Biggie than it is about the everyday experiences of a man described by his friends as much funnier and more big-hearted than his public image sometimes suggested. Despite the title, “I Got a Story to Tell� is primarily concerned with all the tales that went untold.