‘The Disciple’ Review: Amusing Tale of How a Hip-Hop Protege Led the Wu Tang Clan Into a Deal With the Devil for the World’s Rarest Album

 
In the annals of recorded music as collectors’ items, nothing stands out quite like “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the Wu Tang Clan album that was minted as a limited edition of just one copy, with a prohibition on any reproduction, and sold for $2 million to the highest bidder in 2015. The plot thickened when said bidder turned out to be hedge fund founder Martin Shkreli, who turned himself into one of America’s supervillains soon after buying the right to become the album’s sole owner and possibly sole listener. Further wrinkles developed when Shkreli’s imprisonment led to the Justice Department coming into possession of the extremely expensive boxed set. It’s fair to say there won’t be a juicier story revolving around record collecting in our lifetimes.
 
The “Shaolin” saga makes for an amusing yarn, well told, in “The Disciple,” a documentary premiering at Sundance from filmmaker Joanna Natasegara. Ostensibly, though, the movie is meant to serve as the story of a tangential figure in the greater Wu Tang community, Dutch Moroccan rapper-producer Tarik Azzougarh, known to hip-hop fans as Cilvaringz. So “The Disciple” effectively turns out to be two documentaries in one, with the first half focusing on Cilvaringz’s successful quest to come to the U.S. and be discovered by Wu Tang’s members, ingratiating himself in particular into the inner circle of the rap collective’s guiding force, the RZA. The film’s second and inevitably more fascinating half zeroes in specifically on the “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” project, which was primarily conceptualized and produced by Cilvaringz. Whether you consider the Clan’s legendary single-copy album to have been a stroke of genius or an elitist boondoggle (or both), this insider/outsider may deserve most of the credit or blame.
 
The nine actual members of the Wu Tang Clan collective weren’t interviewed for the project, and are only heard from in archival interviews, although the RZA was on-boarded as an executive producer. That’s a pretty big hole to fill in. (In a Variety interview, Natasegara made it seem as if the lack of fresh Wu Tang interviews was her own choice, although, if so, it’s a curious one.) Fortunately, Cilvaringz makes for a charismatic and compelling narrator of his own story — it’s easy to see why the RZA fell for him as an associate — and the doc also benefits from hearing from his international pals and key members of the Wu Tang Killa Bees, which is essentially the collective’s auxillary league, or B-team.

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Through their recollections, we see how Cilvaringz’s vast ambition paid off, from his roots as a bullied Muslim kid in the Netherlands who found his escape from a discriminatory reality in, first, MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, then the Wu Tang Clan, who practically represented a whole cinematic universe for a far-off teenager to dive into. (Emphasis there on the cinematic, since, as the documentary establishes, the Wu Tang members picked up a lot of their ideas and mojo from “Enter the Dragon” and other Asian film culture.)
 
Through repeated international flights to the U.S., dogged persistence and a few happy accidents, Cilvaringz literally finds himself on stage with the Wu Tang Clan at a mid-’90s concert and then, after being booted from it in a near-riot, reconnecting with the RZA under quieter circumstances. He became a tour promoter and record producer associated with group members. His ultimate production was the six years he spent assembling “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which wasn’t originally intended to be an official Wu Tang album. Right as the RZA was giving his sign-off that it was strong enough to be billed under the group’s moniker, Cilvaringz brought up the high-concept idea of positioning it as a great work of art that should be sold like one. Some of the members balked at this, but a majority voted in favor, and then it was off to the auction-house races.
 
Director Natasegara has made her name as a producer of global documentaries where the stakes are a lot higher than they are here, including winning an Oscar for the 2016 short subject “The White Helmets,” about volunteer rescue workers in Syria. No doubt she was attracted to this decidedly less weighty fare at least in part because of what Cilvaringz represents, as someone who has been able to leap-frog through different countries and cultures — a Muslim, hip-hop-obessed Horatio Alger sort, who was not dissuaded by having been born into the wrong place. But “The Disciple” will rise or fall based on how much interest moviegoers take in the silliest parts of the story, in the latter stretches. She’s not the first or last documentarian with a serious, sociopolitical instinct who’s turned out to have a solid aptitude for relaying a good entertainment-related tale that has more laughs than harrowing moments.
 
The doc does benefit from having something akin to the Hollywood convention of a classic bad guy in a villain as made-to-order as Shkreli, who in the 2010s became even more famous for smirking about multiplying the cost of vital prescription drugs than he did for being the winning bidder on the Wu Tang album. Cilvaringz and his associates relay anecdotes about all the possible solutions they considered to keep the bad karma of the sale to Shkreli at bay, including trying to convince him to release the album to fans for free, or to participate in a scripted Twitter beef where Clan associates would stage a raid and steal the album back. Those plans were thwarted when Shkreli took the feud seriously and began issuing threats — rendered moot when the U.S. government became the album’s new owners. Cilvaringz likens its fate to the ending of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the title object is carted off into a warehouse in a crate … although “Shaolin” has subsequently been reacquired, for purposes not entirely clear, by an NFT company.
 
Things get a little fuzzy at the end, since Natasegara isn’t really interested in letting us know where Cilvaringz or his relations with the Wu Tangers are at in the present day, beyond asking the producer if his career was ruined by the perception of “Shaolin” as a disaster. It seems as if the doc was made without any Wu Tang participation, until the RZA shows up literally in the last 10 seconds, with the words “executive producer” appearing over his head to assure everyone there was an official co-sign. Although puzzling, that’s not a fatal flaw: As the New Testament has shown, sometimes it’s fine to get a good story told through the disciples’ point of view.