Liza Womack is a first-grade teacher in her fifties, with wide, rectangular glasses and hair parted down the middle, Patti Smith style. She lives in Huntington, Long Island, in a three-bedroom house with a “Bernie 2016” sign in the front window, a “Workers of the World, Unite!” poster on a wall, and a paperback copy of “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution” on the coffee table. “I’ve read chunks of it and enjoyed it, but I’ve never been able to finish it,” she said the other day. “Too close to home, I guess.” The book is by her father, the Marxist historian John Womack, Jr. Shortly after it was published, in 1968, he got tenure at Harvard, where one of his closest friends was a fellow Rhodes Scholar from Oklahoma named Terrence Malick. When Malick made his first feature film, “Badlands,” he cast John Womack as a grizzled state trooper. “My dad and Terry are still as close as brothers,” Liza said. “A few years after I finished school”—also Harvard, also history—“I went to Paris, and Terry was there, and he brought me to all sorts of dinner parties and introduced me to counts and countesses, which I thought was pretty cool.”
In late 2017, when Liza was facing a film-related predicament, she called Malick. The predicament was born of tragedy: Liza’s son, Gustav Åhr—known to friends and family as Gus, better known to the world as the emo rapper Lil Peep—had just died, of a drug overdose, at the age of twenty-one. Handsome, charismatic, prolifically tattooed, and photogenically sad, he had been on the brink of international fame, and he left behind a cache of unreleased footage, both audio and video. “I was frozen with grief,” Liza said. She kept getting calls “talking about how there was going to be a documentary about Gus’s life, and the first few times I just said no, or ignored it. Then I called Terry and told him, ‘If this is getting made one way or the other, I’d rather have you be in charge of it.’ ”
Which is how Malick became an executive producer of “Everybody’s Everything,” a new documentary that makes Lil Peep’s talent legible even to viewers who might not consider themselves fans of either emo or rap, much less both at once. The film’s spiritual core is the artist’s relationship with his family, especially his grandfather. “I split with Gus’s father when Gus was in high school,” Liza said. “Gus started acting out—punching walls, that kind of thing—and I’d call my dad, freaking out, and he’d say, ‘I’ll write him a letter.’ ” Gus didn’t always respond to his grandfather’s letters, Liza said, “but I know he read them, and I know they reached him in a deep way.” At one point, Gus posted a photo on Instagram: John Womack, looking stern, seated in front of a bookcase and a portrait of Lenin. “This is my grandpa he is a retired professor of Latin American history at Harvard and a badass communist,” he wrote. “#vivalarevolucion.”
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in Huntington, Liza carried a plastic tub of Gus’s effects downstairs to the living room. She opened a manila folder marked “Jack’s letters.” “Every time I found one of these lying around the house, I was sure to save it,” she said. “My thought was, when my father died, Gus would want them.” Her voice broke. “Happened the other way around, I guess.”
One letter, written on yellow legal paper, began, “Dear Gus, dear grandson, my prophet, my tattooed poet of the sweet heart.” From another letter, also on legal paper: “I know the gold in you, how good you are at heart.” Another, this one typed, ended with “Is there any particular Johnny Cash CD you’d like?” Gus appreciated Johnny Cash, but not the CD format; two years later, for Christmas, his grandfather gave him a book called “How Music Got Free,” about the MP3 revolution.
“Everybody’s Everything” includes an interview with Gus’s high-school girlfriend. “Gus literally told me once, if he was to die, he thinks Jack would be the person welcoming him into Heaven,” she says. Near the end of the film, there’s a long, close shot of John Womack, in his office in Cambridge, talking about grief and eternity—“Gus is gone. . . . He’s way beyond the blue”—followed by an orchestral swell and a sweeping overhead shot of a deep, endless ocean. “He had work to do, and he wanted to do it,” John continues. “To say what he had to say. A real, bell-ringing truth.” It’s a very Terry moment. ♦