Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Life in Pink’ on Hulu, Where Machine Gun Kelly Surveys His Work-Life Balance

First announced earlier this month, the music doc Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink arrives on Hulu to reveal a few years in the life of the Platinum-selling rapper, rocker, songwriter, actor – and graphic novel writer, fashion show music curator, and nail polish creator, it turns out – who’s found recent success with a hyperactive punk-pop sound fueled by lyrical explorations of emotional tumult and the tortured search for love. Pete Davidson is also his BFF, and, as of January, he’s Megan Fox’s husband-to-be.

LIFE IN PINK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink is a portrait of the artist as he sees it, sticking mostly to a period between 2018 and the present, from the success of his 2019 rap-rock album Hotel Diablo, which debuted at number five on the Billboard charts, to MGK’s transition to a pop-punk sound with the resulting Tickets to My Downfall and Mainstream Sellout, which both debuted at number one. For all of his success – Downfall eventually went Platinum – the musician, songwriter, and budding actor remains preoccupied with his haters in both the public and the media. A social media supercut of randoms declaring how much he sucks is aligned with Kelly himself reading a Rolling Stone article that rips him to shreds and declares his ascendance to A-list status as a shtick based purely in aesthetic. And that preoccupation is probably why Life in Pink spends a good chunk of time in the recording studio with the man born Colson Baker. Here he is tracking new lyrics; here he is noodling on a piano; here he is wailing on an electric guitar; here are he and his bandmates and producers – plus famous faces and contributors like Halsey and Trippie Redd – laying down tracks in isolation booths. Even Machine Gun Kelly’s viral success releasing online cover songs and Zoom collabos during COVID-19 lockdown is framed as another avenue for him to be taken seriously. “Whether it’s my antics or attitude,” he says during an interview, “the actual music just would kind of get looked over.”

Barring testimonials from Travis Barker (“I was so impressed by Kells”), Kelly’s chief collaborator for Downfall and Sellout, his daughter Casie Baker, and band members and friends Brandon “Slimxx” Allen and Steve “Baze” Basil, Life in Pink largely eschews cutaway interviews. Megan Fox, for example, only appears in passing, like when the couple attends an event like the MTV Video Music Awards or she joins MGK on tour. (At one point Fox is seen sitting behind a speaker cabinet on stage, singing along enthusiastically as he performs.) But there are other representative parts of the music doc format here, like Kelly’s trip back to Cleveland, where he spent his high school years, a homecoming that revisits the stage where he first performed, the steps where he wrote lyrics, and the house where his daughter was born. Kelly’s occasionally fraught, but loving relationship with his late father is also explored, and how his 2020 passing informed the lyrics of the Tickets to My Downfall track “Lonely.”

Beyond his quest for professional legitimacy, it’s MGK’s personal journey with his emotional and mental frailties that populate the bulk of Life in Pink. He details a harrowing phone call with Fox made with the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth, his efforts to “kick the drugs for real this time,” and how his workaholic tendencies came to head with the push to make Mainstream Sellout his second straight number one. When that moment ultimately happens, and when his manager calls him with the news, Kelly is nevertheless down in the dumps, because his perfectionism has pushed away the ones he cares about most.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The list of COVID-prompted, autobiographical music docs/promotional tools just keeps growing. Life in Pink joins Justin Bieber: Our World, where Biebs performs an exclusive concert during lockdown, and Charli XCX: Alone Together, which chronicles the singer’s effort to write and record an entire album during quarantine.

Performance Worth Watching: Casie Baker, Machine Gun Kelly’s preteen daughter, describes how, when she was forced to become her dad’s biggest defender in the face of online trolls and assorted social media haters, she ably rose to the challenge.

Memorable Dialogue: “When I got in my relationship,” Machine Gun Kelly says of his romance with fiancee Megan Fox, “No one could fuckin’ move, there was no shows.” (the two met in 2020 during lockdown.) “So she met me and never even got to see me do the one thing that I accepted myself for.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing salacious; lots of skin on display, though, if you’re talking about MGK and Travis Barker and the rest of their extremely tatted-up friends and collaborators, including the onscreen application of “tickets to my downfall” around Kelly’s neck and “Born With Horns” being emblazoned on his and Barker’s forearms.

Our Take: Before his Platinum-selling emergence as a pop-punk provocateur, before Megan Fox called him her “very tall, handsome, demonic creature,” and before he curated his signature brand of nail polish, Machine Gun Kelly was most well known as a rapper who occasionally rocked in a spastic kind of way, and as the guy who tried to shake some life into a room full of half-lidded Interscope Records people when he stomped and wailed like a banshee from atop a boardroom table while playing them the demos for Tickets to My Downfall. Both that episode and Fox’s demonic quotable make it into the final cut for Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink, so there’s certainly an allowance here for spectacle, and the relative size of MGK’s outlandish persona. (Not to mention his penchant for oversized spiked leather jackets.) But it’s precisely because of that spectacle, because of his polarizing public life, that Pink works best when it peels away the hot pink and full body tattoo veneer to reveal the person inside the skin. And sure, it’s from his approved perspective only. This is a production of one heart and one mind, and that’s Colson Baker’s. But what he does choose to reveal about himself and the inner life that’s informed his journey to stardom gives Life in Pink some gravity. Certainly more than the wasted minutes rehashing a pissy feud with Corey Taylor from Slipknot.

Probably the best sequence that reveals the man behind the pink sequined and bloodstained curtain is when Machine Gun Kelly pulls out all of the stops to be Dear Old Dad. It’s late at night in Los Angeles, and Kelly is departing his home with support staff in tow, boxy, glittery designer pants, an oversized leather jacket, and all manner of accessories. He’ll fly through the night to Cleveland, where a waiting vehicle will whisk him to his daughter Casie’s volleyball game. The whole bit has the grindy feel of any star musician putting in the miles to make it to a gig, only this time MGK is suddenly sitting courtside in a normal school gym, rooting for Casie’s serve, still clad in his oversized leather jacket and the rest of the rock star accouterments. It’s wonderfully incongruous, and a very human moment for a guy who has often been portrayed – often by himself – as anything but.

Our Call: STREAM IT, especially if you’re already a fan, since Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink offers some pretty deep access to his inner life and inner circle. For anyone else, it’s a flashy portrait of a guy navigating his fame and fighting for his respect.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges