Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp

[Dierctor Jorge] Hinojosa does a good job of showing Iceberg's humanity without glossing over the viciousness of his chosen profession.

The film succeeds as an introduction to Beck the writer but is undercut by its lack of gritty details.

The film is weighed down by the testimony of bespectacled professors from hip critical studies and English departments and a psychologist, who describe Mr. Beck's biography without the punch and lyricism of his prose.

Intentions and effect are at odds throughout Jorge Hinojosa's one-note documentary Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp ...

Beck's widow, his ex-wife and three daughters paint the man as someone whose success only complicated his life, estranging him from his family and eventually saddling him with crippling inertia.

It certainly threatens to succumb to hero worship, but Jorge Hinojosa wisely subverts Slim's mythos by pulling the curtain back on it in the doc's second half by revealing the man beneath.

An illuminating and entertaining documentary.

Docu admires and glamorizes pimping with celeb interviews.

The question of how deep a scumbag's amends must run hangs uneasily over the entire movie, which awkwardly straddles the line between amiable hagiography and a more discerning sociological study.

After an unpromising beginning, Iceberg Slim develops into a thorny, engaging exploration of the strange twilight and late-in-life fame of a bona fide American outlaw.