DMX: Don't Try to Understand

The documentary follows a year in the life of the rapper Earl Simmons, known on stage as DMX. Simmons is released at the start of 2019 after serving a sentence for tax evasion. Afterwards he tries to rebuild his place in music and to renew his ties with his family and his listeners. The camera moves between the road, the studio and ordinary life. The film shows him not as a legend but as a person with daily business to deal with. Questions of addiction and debt sit inside the account without being enlarged. Simmons died in April 2021, before the film was released. The work was finished after that death, and the account does not slide into elegy. Christopher Frierson’s seventy nine minute American documentary was completed in 2021.