Notorious charts the remarkable rise of Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G. “Wallace – who, in just a few short years, shot from the tough streets of Brooklyn to the heights of hip-hop legend. Peeling back his mythic image eleven years after his tragic death, Notorious reveals the tumultuous and all too brief journey of a blazingly talented, fiercely determined young man whose unforgettable rap stories of inner city street life, with their raw truth and vivid rhymes, became emblematic of a whole generation’s brutal reality and its dreams of escaping it for something bigger.
The story follows the young Biggie (portrayed by Wallace’s real – life son Christoper Jordan Wallace as a youngster and Brooklyn rapper Jamal Woolard as an adult) from his surprising youth as a Catholic school honor student whose proud mother (Angela Bassett) tries to keep him off the street corners to his years as a tough teenage drug dealer, and then to his life-changing move into young fatherhood, as his girlfriend Jan(Jullia Pace Mitchell) gives birth to his daughter, prompting his to go on a mission to provide for his child by any means – legal or not. But everything changes when a “freestyle” rap tape that Biggie created just for fun ends up with B.I.G. Daddy Kane’s DJ Mister Cee (Edwin Freeman), and eventually in the hands of ambitious rap impresario Sean “Puffy” Combs (Derek Luke), whose marketing savvy and production genius transform Biggie into a cultural sensation almost overnight.
Now, with his career taking off into superstar territory, Biggie finds himself with “mo’ money, mo’ problems” and is under all kinds of new pressures. His mangers, Wayne Barrow (C. Malik Whitfield) and Mark Pitts (Kevin Phillip), attempt to keep the young man’s feet on the ground and mind in the studio, as he juggles the demands of recording, fatherhood and marriage to fellow Bad Boy artist Faith Evans (Antonique Smith) not to mention his complicated friendship with fellow Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Kimberly “Lil Kim” Jones (Naturi Naughton) and the increasingly heated rivalry with West Coast rapper Tupac Shkur (Anthony Mackie).
But just as Biggie starts to come into true manhood and solidify his musical legacy as the creator of one of hip-hop’s greatest bodies of work, fate has other plans.
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