In 1994, Brooklyn-bred MC Christopher Wallace, known better as Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, hit the ground running, reviving New York City as one of hip-hop's central nerve centers with his debut album, "Ready to Die." Biggie's musical output, which includes numerous singles and a second album, "Life After Death," is the most blues-based and blues-inspired hip-hop catalog ever produced. His albums weave a convincing narrative of the entanglement of crime, drugs, misogyny, death and despair in the life of one young black man, an experience shared by numerous urban men of color from New Orleans to Detroit to Richmond.

Wallace, whose life is the subject of the new film "Notorious," opening Friday in the Bay Area, did not celebrate poverty; he pointed to its complexity. He suggested the myriad of ways that fiscal poverty potentially breeds poverty of the mind and spirit, of health ("My mother has cancer in the breast, don't ask me why I am (expletive) stressed"), of love and of compassion. He relayed that how we define success can also potentially produce other forms of poverty - destabilization of community and familial support, i.e. "More Money, More Problems" - and appreciation through martyrdom, i.e. "You're Nobody Till Somebody Kills You."

Biggie's work did not always supply an uplifting social commentary, but it certainly did provide social commentary and provoke thought. He put together albums that, when examined for their breadth and complexity, were unique and vast. Each album was a complete document - a novel and testimony on wax.

As the main character of his own creation, Biggie was a modern-day Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright's "Native Son" protagonist come to life in the Reagonomic, crack commandment, dilapidated New York of 1975 to 1995. Biggie advanced Wright's narrative of black existentialism in fantastic ways and, ultimately, produced a narrative far more profound than Wright's novel. This is because where Wright failed, Biggie succeeded.

Unlike Wright's Bigger, Biggie conveyed a variety of emotions: happiness, anger, wit, humor, lust, jealousy, envy, heartbreak, sexual persona, despair and hope. We are supplied with a more complete, thus real and human, human being.

While Bigger was antisocial, Biggie appeared to be deeply engaged in society and culture, as indicated by how so many young black men still see themselves somewhere in his music, and even more so in his storytelling. They are not always Big, the lead character, but someone who knew Big or someone like him (think "I Got a Story to Tell").

In the end, Biggie, unlike Bigger, is not simply the anti-hero, black thug or, even worse, the anti-human - what James Baldwin called, "the monster produced by the American republic."

Instead, he is a depressed, alienated young man who still embraces his communal traditions and paradoxes. Big stands between tradition and alienation, the two combatting forces of American identity and what it means to be a modern human being. And, in the end, although it appears that he chooses to succumb to the consequences of his alienation, he still produced a narrative that sheds light on the impact of both.

Although it is difficult to effectively capture a person's genius in a two-hour film biography, the new Fox Searchlight film will succeed if it conveys the complexity of Biggie's social commentary, life and artistic legacy, rather than falling into the trap of giving us the man and his music without the substance. Although Biggie felt trapped before his death in 1997, his brilliance should not suffer a similar fate.

E-mail Robeson T.P. Frazier at datebook@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle