You’ve already decided how you feel about the Jussie Smollett doc

On the other side, you have an opposite narrative. What if Smollett wasn’t making it up, despite the mountainous and sometimes ridiculous evidence against him? What if the Chicago Police Department, an organization synonymous with cover-ups, was covering something up? Typically, one would have no problem making a convincing case that Chicago cops took the easy way out, even when they weren’t crumpling under the pressure coming from now-disgraced mayor Rahm Emanuel. 

And yet, The Truth About Jussie Smollett? finds itself in a click-seeking conundrum common to its form: It both desires to make these politicized waters as muddy as possible—to splash around in the mess—and to examine some of the truly absurd details that make the story so juicy in the first place. It wants to stay inoffensive to Jussie Smollett, who personally sits down in the doc for emotional interviews where he continues to profess his innocence, while also pointing out some (but not all) of the lurid contradictions and coincidences that make him look extremely guilty.

This is a case of a documentarian (or a documentary production firm, which cranked out Netflix dreck like The Tinder Swindler and Don’t F**k With Cats) biting off more than they bargained for. Director Gagan Rehill and his team just wanted to put Ola and Bola, the larger-than-life Nigerian bodybuilder brothers who claimed Smollett hired them to stage an attack, in front of a camera. The resulting film is simply not equipped to dig into Chicago’s history of police violence and corruption. It wanted to note how silly it seemed that Smollett draped a noose back around his neck in order to greet some arriving cops, not press on the psychology of someone who might exploit America’s malignant reputation for clout.

That means the people left doing the deciding are those half-watching on the couch. They’re the ones confronted with a racial-profiling version of the blue and black/white and gold dress phenomenon. A piece of security footage allegedly capturing Smollett’s attackers, hate-filled or hired, is dug up with little explanation by a freelance journalist, then shown to those involved with the incident. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson, the investigating detective, Ola and Bola’s lawyer, and alleged eyewitnesses who claim they saw white men running from the scene—they all have different reads on the men caught on tape. Some see Black men, some see white. Nobody can tell for sure, and it seems to rely less on the pixelated hues and more on the subconsciouses of those looking at them.

The Truth About Jussie Smollett? rests its punctuation provocation upon this small uncertainty, upon the understanding that some viewers will (perhaps rightly) look for any reason to discount CPD’s findings and that some viewers will leap through any mental hoops to condemn an outspoken actor. But like so many of the nonfictional filler crowding the carousels, it doesn’t do this with evidence. It doesn’t build a case, or ask hard questions, or present new findings. Hell, it doesn’t even present all the old findings—like how Smollett testified that he was in a sexual relationship with one of the brothers he allegedly paid to attack him, or that he and the brothers met up a few days before Smollett was attacked and drove in circles around the scene of the future crime—at risk of alienating the talent who knew that this doc wanted their star power more than answers. Like many of these post-viral documentaries, it courts an audience looking to get the quick buzz of scandal that one usually gets from a supermarket checkout headline or a “Legal Issues” subheader, an audience happy to supply their own answers in the face of an intentionally obscured narrative.