Stream It Or Skip It: ‘We Are Freestyle Love Supreme’ On Hulu, A Documentary About A Freestyle Improv Group With Lin-Manuel Miranda And Friends

You’ve probably heard the name “Freestyle Love Supreme” somewhere over the years, but aren’t quite sure where… until Lin-Manuel Miranda hit it huge with Hamilton. But the group, started by Miranda, Hamilton director Thomas Kail, and other friends from Wesleyan University in the late ’90s, has been in the limelight for about 15 years, ever since they started mounting their own shows in a makeshift basement theater in a Manhattan book store. Now a new Hulu documentary presents the history of the group, which was so influential on LMM that Hamilton likely wouldn’t have happened if FLS didn’t happen first.

WE ARE FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The documentary We Are Freestyle Love Supreme, directed by Andrew Fried, films the rehearsals, backstage scenes and on-stage performances of FLS during its 2019 reunion tour, which played for a month in a theater in the West Village, six months before a 17-week Broadway engagement. It also incorporates footage of the group in 2005, when most of the originating members were only a few years out of college — Christopher Jackson was the oldest member of the group at the ripe age of 30 — and doing shows at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh.

What FLS does is right there in the first word of the group’s name — they take suggestions that the audience wrote on little cards and create freestyle raps out of whole cloth, often backed by beats laid down by the vocal gymnastics of Chris “Shockwave” Sullivan. The group’s origins, with Kail and Anthony “Two Touch” Veneziale bonding over hip hop and freestyling. Eventually Kail would be the creative mind and director behind their stage shows, and FLS was soon expanded to include Miranda, keyboardist and composer Bill Sherman, Jackson and keyboardist/vocalist Arthur Lewis.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, as Miranda and Kail were mounting Miranda’s musical In The Heights, which would eventually make Broadway, Utkarsh Ambudkar and James Monroe Iglehart were added to the group, bringing some diversity and new voices, and the reunion shows include all of them in the performances. Of course, LMM would generate the biggest applause, but the FLS reunion wasn’t about star power; it was about old friends performing together in a collective and unique experience between them and the audience in the theater that evening.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In a lot of ways, We Are Freestyle Love Supreme reminds us of Beastie Boys Story, despite radically different documentary styles. It’s about old friends who still loved performing together, no matter where their lives went as they got older and how famous they got.

Performance Worth Watching: The improvisation skills of everyone in the group are amazing, whether they rap like LMM or Ambudkar, they sing like Lewis or Iglehart, or do both, like Jackson (not surprisingly, Wayne Brady also did time in the group, though he’s not in the film). We were most impressed, however, with Ambudkar, whose comedic chops have been on display in shows like The Mindy Project and Brockmire for years. The pace of his freestyling was unmatched, and he had some great stories to tell during the “Truth” segment of each show, where the members improvise personal stories. His story about how he was LMM’s choice for Aaron Burr in Hamilton, but had to step away due to addiction issues, was one of the more moving segments in the documentary.

Memorable Dialogue: Ambudkar: “The positive thing [about stepping away] is that, ‘Hey man, how come you don’t pick up a drink?’ ‘Well, let me tell you about this little thing called Hamilton.'” Ambudkar doesn’t regret stepping away from what became a monster cultural touchstone of a hit because it was the impetus to get him sober.

Our Take: What carries the 85-minute run of We Are Freestyle Love Supreme isn’t the straightforward documentary style, which combines performance footage with backstage footage, interviews and archival footage. And it’s not really one of those Behind The Music-style documentaries about a band’s rise and fall. Yes, LMM, Kail and Sherman had to step away once In The Heights and especially Hamilton got going. The close friendship between Kail and Venezaile changed when the latter moved with his family to the west coast. But the group has performed at least a few times every year since their mid-’00s salad days, so that’s not a big part of the story.

No, what will keep your interest in this movie is the friendships formed between the members of the group, which led to everyone trying to keep the group together despite the inevitable divergence of everyone’s lives and careers as they got older. Also what will keep your interest are the impressive performances during both the footage in 2005 and the reunion in 2019. And that’s without members like Daveed Diggs, who is just as supremely talented as the others.

What we appreciated is that LMM, Kail and the others found people to add to the group that gave different perspectives, because, let’s face it: In 2005, the group was mostly white and mostly privileged. Seeing some of the older footage of the group in their 20s, wearing hats backwards and freestyling in the streets of Edinburgh to promote their Fringe show, had a bit of a cringe factor given the origins of the group. But when they looked for new voices, they found people like Ambudkar and Iglehart, which made the show less like a fun project for a bunch of Wesleyan drama students and a more cohesive and robust group.

But if you’re not a fan of LMM, or hip hop, or think freestyle is a gimmick, there isn’t a lot of conflict, or particularly juicy storytelling, to hang your hat on.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme isn’t the most dramatic documentary out there, but the band members’ enduring friendship and their amazing improvisational skills will keep you interested.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream We Are Freestyle Love Supreme On Hulu