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‘Coolness is not a renewable resource,” says a contributor to this documentary about Vice magazine’s rise and fall. In the late 2000s and 2010s Vice grew from a punk magazine into a digital media empire by telling the world what was cool (more specifically by telling millennials, then in their cool-seeking prime). By 2017, it was valued at nearly $6bn; in 2023, Vice filed for bankruptcy. A man who saw it from the inside is TV chef Eddie Huang, the director and frontman of this film. He had a long-running show on the Viceland TV channel and says he’s still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.
Huang is also an advert for the best of Vice: fast, funny and authentic. The film begins with plenty of “you had to be there” stories about Brooklyn before gentrification, and interviews with early staff. This isn’t meant unkindly, but Vice Is Broke will be essential viewing for anybody who ever worked there, with its details about who had what job title and when. Clips show why Vice felt so edgy (like that time they took basketball star Dennis Rodman to North Korea to meet Kim Jong-un).
There is also analysis of how Vice’s raw on-the-ground news reporting hooked young people who didn’t read newspapers or watch TV news. Then the mainstream media started sniffing around and there’s a funny story about the two worlds colliding. One contributor remembers smoking a “dip”, a cigarette dipped in formaldehyde, outside the Vice offices. He saw an older man in the reception: “I recognise that guy, it’s Robert Murdoch!”
The hubris was epic. Huang says that Vice co-founder Shane Smith once boasted to him that he was planning to buy the BBC with Elon Musk. Huang, who is very, very funny, replied: “Don’t you have to buy England first?” Smith, who remains at Vice, is notably absent here. But there’s an interview with another Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who was kicked out and later formed the far-right Proud Boys.
Then comes the sorry spectacle of Vice becoming uncool, at its nadir putting out puff pieces paid for by Saudi Arabia. But oddly there’s no mention of the New York Times investigation into the toxic boys’ club culture at Vice Media.
