"Stans" Review

 Eminem's 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP contained one of his biggest tracks, "Stan", which told the story of an obsessed stalker fan (thus the portmanteau of "stan") writing him fan letters that become more and more unhinged until it results in the fan killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend because Em never wrote back. The last verse is Em replying to the notes, trying to chill the guy out before ultimately realizing that a news story he'd seen was about Stan.

As both a portrayal of how fans can feel they have personal relationships with celebrities and how it feels to be on the receiving end of such unnerving fan mail, it was Mathers stepping up on his sophomore release to show he was capable of rapping about subjects more nuanced than the cartoonish violence showcased on his debut, The Slim Shady LP.

It also provides the title for the documentary Stans, which is partially a very superficial recap of Mathers' early career and mostly a platform for a lot of his stans to talk about how they love him and how much his music means to them. They identify with what he talks about and find strength in his bravado and vulnerability. While the initial read on them made me wonder if they were handed their own restraining order while signing the release forms, most seem to understand that they're obsessed and aren't looking to harm him though the woman who has the Guinness Book of World Records record for most tattoos of single person (22!) needs to have posters and photos explained to her.

Occasionally, Mathers chimes in with how this feels to him, but there's a dissonance about how detached from reality some fans can get while giving them a platform because they're superfans. They make the pilgrimage to Detroit to visit important sites from his life like Gilbert's Lodge, a restaurant a couple miles from the Detroit border he used to busboy at (that I coincidentally drive past an average of once a day because it's a mile from my home) as if he may be hanging around.

If he wants to temper their hopes up for meeting them, it doesn't help that one fan relates how after a show in 2013, Em's car stopped and a security guy summoned him to get in to meet Mathers and snap a picture. So, he's saying there's a chance? How did Mathers know who this fan was? Don't know.

And that's the core problem with Stans, it doesn't really delve deeply enough into the subject of Mathers or his fans enough to make this critical viewing. At least they put the dates of when things happen so one can realize that the period between his first album dropping and his Oscar-winning movie 8 Mile premiering was less than four years and he'd dropped three albums.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Paramount+.