If you were to go back and rewatch any of Kanye West’s controversial moments from the last seven years – I’m not sure why you would, as West’s devolution from hallowed icon to cultural pariah has been one of the sadder pop culture stories of the decade, but let’s say you did – you would spot, lingering in the background, a kid with a camera.
He’s easy to miss – scrawny, often wearing Calabasas-sized sunglasses, usually holding an iPhone or iPad, he’s nearly indistinguishable from the many fans and associates that often trail West wherever he goes. But he’s always there. In the Oval Office meeting where West pledged his fealty to Donald Trump, at his infamous “white lives matter” Paris fashion show, at any of his messianic “Sunday Service” worship sessions – there he is, impassive, camera trained on the Chicago-born rapper now legally known as Ye.
That kid is Nico Ballesteros, who DM-ed his way into West’s orbit as a teenager in 2016, volunteering to record events West held at his Calabasas compound. By day, Ballesteros was a student at Orange County School of the Arts; by night, he was quickly becoming a staple of West’s entourage. “I would be in class texting with them and they’d be like: ‘Oh, I’m with Ye right now. We’re in Malibu, at Rick Rubin’s,’” Ballesteros, now 26, recalled recently. “And I’d be in class thinking: ‘Why am I even here? I’ve got to be there.’” By senior year, Ballesteros had assimilated into West’s scene. Which is how he got the assignment, shortly after West’s hospitalization for mental distress in 2018, to film constantly for what West pitched as all-access, no-holds barred account of his bipolar disorder post-breakdown (or as the openly unmedicated West proclaimed it, his “breakthrough”.)
Over the next six years, Ballesteros filmed over 3,000 hours of footage of West as the superstar experienced creative breakthroughs and, more often, outbursts, meltdowns, paranoia and international opprobrium. The resulting film, In Whose Name – given limited release this month after a torturous edit – is a grimly fascinating portrait of an exceptionally gifted mega-celebrity in unmitigated crisis, a fly-on-the-wall view of personal and professional downfall.
In Whose Name offers an inverse view to the many shocking clips of West since 2018 – the Oval Office visit, the Chicago homecoming, the strange alliance with evangelical leader Joel Osteen, all filmed from within West’s orbit, with direct access to the delusions of grandeur and megalomaniacal thinking behind them. The film, aiming for a wider release after a solid box office haul with almost no marketing, spans a particularly tumultuous and isolating time in West’s life: his failed, Maga-adjacent presidential campaign; calling slavery a “choice” in a much-denounced 2018 TMZ interview; his divorce from, and harassment of, ex Kim Kardashian; the end of his lucrative partnership with Adidas, among other business deals, after several antisemitic tweets, including: “I’m a Nazi … I love Hitler.”
It’s all, one would imagine, a lot for a teenager to process, let alone film ethically, but Ballesteros takes questions in stride. He maintains that West, who openly decries medication, understood the stakes of filming; in an early scene, taped during Ballesteros’s second week on the job in 2018, West tells the prolific producer Pharrell Williams his intent to document his mental health. “The invitation was apparent to me,” said Ballesteros. At the beginning, he says, West “was in such a clear state of mind. He made it so apparent that that’s what this was for. My silence and my stillness and my observation and bearing witness to it, I feel, was the best service that I could provide to him.”
In Whose Name follows in the mold of verité documentaries – no talking heads, no narration, an unvarnished single timeline, albeit an unfathomably busy and starry one. Ballesteros’s memories of filming are a blur, as he followed West’s sleeping schedule of three to four hours a night. One section from 2018 sees Ballesteros, along with West, travelling to the White House, Uganda, Los Angeles, Big Sur, Chicago and Basel, Switzerland, in the span of a week. It was often a struggle to stay awake. “All I was thinking was, I know we have this thing where I’m supposed to always record,” he recalled of nearly falling asleep in the Oval Office. “That’s what we feel is the mission here. I just have to sustain the shot.”
During the whirlwind, Ballesteros silently witnesses West’s rage toward his wife and her family, Kardashian’s tears as West continues to publicly align with Donald Trump. “I would rather be dead than on medication!” he screams at Kris Jenner in one scene I found difficult to finish. (Of the Kardashians, Ballesteros said “they’ve always been so respectful to me … they obviously knew what I was there to do and they were appreciative of it,” though he’s vague on whether they’ve have had any conversations about a documentary that seems to challenge the tightly controlled image of their media empire. “For the most part, there are certain people who I’ve intersected with organically, and reconnected with across the film as a whole, and some I haven’t,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at that.”)
He witnesses, too, West’s insistence, in meetings with shocked executives and artistic directors, that he’s the greatest artist of all time, a Picasso, a visionary for “not being a slave to these companies”. He serves as a mostly silent fourth wall for West’s assertions of purpose; in a scene that stretches the meaning of surreal, West, unnervingly done up in cat-like prosthetics, insists to the camera that he is “mentally free”, because being bipolar means that everything is an art piece.
One might wonder if there was ever a point – say, when a fuming, clearly disturbed West gets in Kardashian’s face – that the camera should stop. But Ballesteros insists on the inherent neutrality of the project. “Even though I was young, I understood what it meant, more or less, to be a journalist. And I knew interjecting was not my responsibility or my role, and that I would then be crossing a line,” he says. (West treated him well, he said – “he was always so respectful of whenever I needed to take a beat to just rest,” though he “didn’t like when I stopped recording, because I think he just wanted to feel seen, ultimately.”)
Even in West’s most shocking moments – and there are plenty, as he insists on invoking slavery bereft of any historical accuracy – “I always just maintained journalistic integrity,” he said. “I knew that that was the professional thing to do, to keep my own personal opinions out of it. Because if I were to start to have opinions and formulate points of view, it would create a bias. And I didn’t want to change what I initially intended, which was to create an objective observational documentary.” He maintains that West had no input on the final product, though the two watched a cut together, an experience Ballesteros has described as “beautiful”.
Arguably the most fascinating observation is not West’s grim descent into rightwing nihilism, but how everyone around him barely reacts. Ballesteros films West in what seems to be constant contact with the uber-rich, powerful and provocative: Elon Musk, Jacques Herzog, Donald Trump, Drake, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens – all of them overly obsequious, none of them challenging his ego, save Swizz Beatz and a clearly heartbroken Michael Che, post 2018 SNL meltdown. (Chris Rock assures West that his off-script rant defending his Maga hat will go down like Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope.) Everywhere he goes, cameras, eager face, devotion, fascination – “a reality distortion field” of fame. The film’s name, with its religious overtones, provokes questions of our continued attention and loyalty, in the face of madness.
But though In Whose Name is, in part, “a film about idolatry”, Ballesteros said his ultimate aim was compassion. “A lot of those things that may have occurred throughout all those headlines … wasn’t the deepest part of who this human is,” he said.
“Perhaps there’s some empathy there,” he added. “It’s not necessarily a goal of mine to convince anyone of anything, but I wanted to create a study of the human, not the idol.”