Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Juice Wrld: Into The Abyss’ on HBO Max, Documenting The Rapper’s Skyrocket And Descent (2024)

The first season of HBO Max’s Music Box anthology series closes out with Juice Wrld: Into the Abyss. The documentary premieres alongside Fighting Demons, the late rapper’s second posthumous album, and the announcement that HBO has renewed Music Box for a second season. Into the Abyss, directed by Tommy Oliver (Black Love, 1982) is culled from two years of footage filmed during Juice Wrld’s ascendance to worldwide fame, and also features interviews with his loved ones, friends, and music industry peers.

JUICE WRLD: INTO THE ABYSS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: When Juice Wrld died from a drug overdose in December 2019, the 21-year-old rapper, singer, and songwriter had already hit the career stratosphere. Initial singles in 2017, and in particular his May 2018 track “Lucid Dreams,” logged streams by the billions and prime placements in the Billboard Hot 100. His debut album promptly went Platinum. And lyrics that frequently explored depression, anxiety, heartbreak and exclusion resonated with a youthful fanbase attuned to emo themes as well as the shifty, permuting landscape of a contemporary hip-hop sound born and nurtured in the online space. But by the time he was regularly putting up streaming numbers that rivaled Drake and Taylor Swift, Juice Wrld was also well and truly in the grip of his drugs of choice, percocet and ounce after ounce of liquid codeine. Lean is a constant presence in Into the Abyss, as are the pills; the doc is made up largely of footage shot over the last two years of Juice’s life, as he and his entourage fully indulged in the hedonism that comes hand in hand with fame. But Abyss also offers unfettered access to a relentlessly creative mind. Throughout, Juice Wrld seems to express himself almost exclusively in freestyle, the intricate rhymes falling from his mouth like the perpetual comment stream populating the bottom corner of a TikTok.

Into the Abyss includes talking head interviews with principals in the world of Juice, from girlfriend Ally Lotti, manager Lil Bibby, and producer Benny Blanco to friends and collaborators Polo G, G Herbo, The Kid Laroi, and music video director Cole Bennett. All of them were conducted by Abyss director Tommy Oliver after Juice’s death, and they bracket the doc’s verite bulk, where the videographers’ cameras dutifully follow Juice and his entourage through blistering, often ecstatic live performances, late-night, freestyle-laced sessions in the recording studio, lengthy stretches of unstructured banter and chopping it up, and more confessional moments of self-examination that are as revealing as they are populated with percocet drops and sips on lean. Abyss also eschews the outsider take of narration, which further immerses the viewer in Juice’s insular world.

To a person, those interviewed in Into the Abyss describe Juice Wrld as a singular presence, a generational talent, and above all a goodhearted individual. “Whether he knew it or not, Juice was a therapist to millions of kids,” Blanco says. But in the end, there’s also a dazed kind of acceptance that his death from a toxic co*cktail of codeine and oxycodone was entirely preventable, if only they’d policed his intake just a little bit more.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In A Man Named Scott, the recent doc about his life and come-up, rapper, singer and songwriter Kid Cudi discusses his own struggles with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The friends and colleagues of Cudi interviewed also echo what so many of Juice’s crew say – that they didn’t know how deep the depression went or how powerful the anxiety was. The difference, of course, is that Cudi survived while Juice didn’t, and neither did Lil Peep, the emo rapper who died of a drug overdose in 2017 and who is the subject of the Netflix documentary Everybody’s Everything.

Performance Worth Watching: Juice Wrld himself is a captivating presence here, a combustible mix of sensitivity, offhand charm, thoughtfulness, performative brio, and startling rap erudition.

Memorable Dialogue: “I heard, like…I swear it was his demons leaving him,” girlfriend Ally Lotti says of the chaotic moments just before his death, as authorities approached Juice Wrld’s Gulfstream on the Midway Airport tarmac. “He called out my name, and he seized up.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Juice Wrld: Into the Abyss begins right inside the maelstrom, with a lingering close-up on the rapper as he freestyles. It lasts for minutes, but it could easily be hours. Juice’s rhymes interlock on words and phrases that grow into and over each other, and exuberant throwbacks to childhood memories mix with mercurial references to the chemical management of anxiety and mortal thoughts. For Juice, this is just another night. (In Abyss, it’s often night – the rapper and his crew are definitely nocturnal.) But for the viewer, it’s a singular example of his spellbinding talent, and how it often emerged fully-formed and spontaneous all at once. This is a theme of the interviews in Abyss, too, how the rapper’s talent was so bountiful that it couldn’t even be held in something as rote as a song. But if he was always craving more space to work, Juice was also craving more pills and lean. It gets to the point in Abyss that Juice is so far inside his world, he no longer knows which way is up. In one moment, he admits that making better choices with his life might be paramount moving forward. In the next, a friend describes Juice as having drank a pint of liquid codeine all on his own.

While the interviews in Into the Abyss offer some insight into the talent and drive of an artist at work, it’s in the doc’s immersive midsection that we truly see him. Juice’s world was the environment of modern performance and stardom, and the camera moves with him through the interconnected chambers of that existence. The stage and its strobes and smoke gives way to a movable wall, revealing an idling tour bus at the ready, and in turn its exclusive inner sanctum, ferrying the rapper and his retinue to the enveloping world of a recording studio or the private space of his spacious modernist home. And since he’s rarely doing anything that isn’t directly related to his career or existence as a moneyed recording artist, those activities become the only tangible elements in Juice’s life. The rulebook of the everyday doesn’t apply, and neither does normal fuel. Instead it’s weed pens, and 20 percs a day, and a cup of lean perpetually at arm’s reach. If the abyss is, as G Herbo describes it, the place where depression lives, a place populated with sadness and the fear of always falling, it’s also an apt description of the blinkered personal universe that Juice Wrld inhabited in his final years of life.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Season one of the Music Box documentary series closes with what might be its most tragic entry. Juice Wrld: Into the Abyss is a you-were-there portrait of a young artist’s span as a meteoric hip-hop presence, his descent into drug addiction, and the aftermath of his tragic end.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Juice Wrld: Into The Abyss on HBO Max