Anyone throwing on the cheaply made true-crime documentaries that flood streaming services know that these films trade in sensation rather than investigation. Whether they’re injecting a hit of schadenfreude around a public disaster or rubbernecking its leering gaze at a gross tabloid story, these movies are about reliving scandal, not understanding it. These movies rely on something I call Doccam’s Razor: The simplest solution to a true-crime case is not the reason we’re watching the documentary about it.
Without the journalistic aspirations of their genre predecessors, these filmmakers simply spend 90 minutes rehashing topics that went viral because of how widely they were covered and discussed at the time. The better you know the stories, the more transparent these disposable docs’ biases become. And yet, sometimes a doc is so content to coast on name recognition that its incurious construction only emphasizes the Rorschach test of its central case. This is how The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, a film whose very title can’t take a stand, presents its Chicago-set scandal: Not as a strange hoax that’s only become clearer in the past six years, but as a war still raging between politically charged forces. In this way, the film really does make its audience relive a scandal that relied less on truth than on ideology and emotion.
The 2019 incident where Empire actor Jussie Smollett reported that he was the victim of a hate crime in downtown Chicago, attacked by two white men spewing slurs and draping a noose around his neck, has been litigated to a perfectly unsatisfying conclusion. In November 2024, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett’s five convictions for making false police reports, but not because it had determined his innocence. Rather, it was because Smollett had previously made a deal with prosecutor Kim Foxx’s office, exchanging a few hours of community service and a $10,000 bond for them dropping all charges. That he was later retried for the same offenses violated his due process, the court determined. So he was originally found guilty, but never really exonerated—a perfect gray area for a documentary to dig into.
This is not what The Truth About Jussie Smollett? does. Much like its subject matter and many of its true-crime peers, the film crackles with charged preconceived notions, and it delights in rubbing them together like staticky balloons. From the moment Smollett claimed he was attacked by guys shouting about “MAGA country,” simple lines were drawn in the sand. Political figures from both parties condemned the attack, from Kamala Harris to then-and-now President Donald Trump. But when the Chicago police determined that, hang on, none of this is adding up, Trump was quick to gloat. A gay Black actor is the bad guy? And there’s (fictional) violence in Chicago? And the Democratic city’s workers look like fools? And MAGA chuds have been falsely blamed? It’s like a Project 2025 fairy tale.
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.
