By the time Vice Media filed for bankruptcy in 2023, Eddie Huang, host and creator of the Viceland food and travel show “Huang’s World,” figured the company owed him residuals running into six figures. For him, it was personal, because Vice had been a place he believed in, where he felt he belonged.
With his documentary “Vice Is Broke,” Huang unfurls an angry but loving lament, determined to unravel how a free Montreal zine grew into a New York-based corporate behemoth bent on world domination. Pieces of the company still exist, including a relaunched print magazine, but they’re mere shadows of the giant, valued at $5.7 billion at its height, that drew such investors as Rupert Murdoch and Disney.
This documentary, like the upstart publication, fuses punk energy and polish. In its broadest sense, this is a familiar tale of hubris and greed. But it’s also a very specific exploration of a company poised on the edge between scrappy satire and big business, and ultimately losing its balance with sensationalism, advertising posing as journalism, inflated internet traffic numbers, no workable digital model, and complaints of workplace harassment.
Huang, the chef behind a onetime downtown hot spot, Baohaus, who wrote “Fresh Off the Boat” (a memoir adapted into a sitcom that he loathed), interviews former Vice staff members, often in handsome bars and restaurants. Producers tell him how they wearied of their work going uncredited while a co-founder, Shane Smith, hogged the spotlight. Amy Kellner and Lesley Arfin, two of the first female writers there, offer insights into the frequently obnoxious bro-dominant flow they endured because they wanted to be part of something cutting-edge and exciting. Much of the outrageousness, on the page and in the office, came from another co-founder, Gavin McInnes, who, once ousted, founded the ultranationalist Proud Boys. In the film, he remains eager to shock.
Huang has made an eye-opening capsule history that will resonate most keenly with Vice fans. But there’s something more widely instructive, too, in his portrait of a culture clash that turned into an unlikely courtship: ragtag punks and the investment bankers eager to hit the “millennial sweet spot.”
Vice Is Broke
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Mubi.
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