Meanwhile the appeal of this documentary is not about a great narrative structure or thematic plan, it’s that we haven’t seen this footage before, in part because only Coodie had it. “act i: VISION” does have a laugh-out-loud moment when we see Kanye West react to how much it costs to buy a porno mag in Times Square, and then he buys it. Or here’s Kanye West eating at Burger King after getting the call that he finally got signed. Over and over, it’s the intrigue of watching Kanye West, a future billionaire and self-appointed messiah, trying to get the attention of Roc-A-Fella record employees by rapping “All Falls Down” for them in their offices. Here are moments of brilliance that shaped modern American music, time capsules of a creator evolving into his own brilliance and planet-swallowing narcissism. “Jeen-Yuhs” will captivate some fans just by existing, by taking them to the brink of a musical movement that officially began with Kanye West’s first album, College Dropout.

There are so many frustrating moments in this profoundly incomplete Wiki-page of a docuseries, written in first-person-so many cut corners, so many unnecessary diversions into Coodie’s own life, including a look at his stand-up career-so let’s focus on what does make the docuseries special. The baffling experience of “Jeen-Yuhs” is to watch Coodie prevail as a cameraman-capturing West’s hustle from producer to rapper to icon, filming eureka studio moments with the ease of everyday life-and then fail his billionaire subject matter’s legacy as a documentarian. Co-directed by Coodie and Chike Ozah, “Jeen-Yuhs” subtitles itself “A Kanye Trilogy” but it’s really the personal log of someone tired of only being the cameraman who followed around West across two decades, and sometimes directed him (Coodie and Ozah did West’s music video debut, “Through the Wire”). The game-changing creative evolution of West is secondary to the series’ main interest-the access that cinematographer Coodie had to the epic saga of West’s career, which started when West was a rising, hungry beat maker and producer in Chicago.

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