Hell’s Kitchen was a hellish neighborhood when Alicia Augello Cook was growing up, and yet she thrived in it. These are the two central facts in the making of the musical artist Alicia Keys, which are much more emphasized in the new documentary that closed the 2026 Tribeca Festival than they were in the musical loosely based on her life.
“Alicia Keys: Girl from Hell’s Kitchen” is inextricably intertwined with the Alicia Keys musical “Hell’s Kitchen.” For one thing, a substantial swath of the documentary is taken up with the making of the musical: Keys talks about having spent thirteen years on it; we see her attending rehearsals, watching musical numbers, offering advice to the cast; we hear what it took to scale up the show from its 400-seat Off-Broadway home to the 1400-seat Shubert. Also, the timing of the movie’s release doesn’t feel like a coincidence: Although the two-year Broadway run of “Hell’s Kitchen” ended in February, the stage musical is currently touring North America, “and expanding to South Korea, Germany and Australia” – as we’re told in the documentary itself.
This synergy (aka self-promotion) doesn’t wind up undermining the film for me. Alicia Keys’ self-invention as an artist is part of what’s fascinating about this elegant, luminous New Yorker. “Alicia Keys: Girl from Hell’s Kitchen” offers an opportunity to learn about the self-declared “tomboy” from a tough neighborhood, “piano prodigy with cornrows,” high school valedictorian, 17-time Grammy winning singer-songwriter and Broadway producer of the movie, and compare her with the semi-autobiographical but far less distinctive fictional character created for the stage.
Directed by the graffiti artist turned filmmaker who calls himself One9, the documentary is a mix of interviews, current-day scenes, and a pile-on of vintage videos and images. There’s six-year-old Alicia in a high-necked white lace pinafore singing “Over the Rainbow,” and teenage Alicia playing classical piano, and then posing with two friends in their girl-group, which they called Ambition. There are old pictures of her mother, Terria Joseph, after she moved from Detroit to New York to become a theater actress. There are photos of the celebrities (Angela Lansbury, Samuel Jackson) who lived or worked in Manhattan Plaza, the apartment building reserved for artists, where Alicia grew up and where she was inspired and taught by a series of mentors. . The real-life Alicia is shown as having more artistic prowess and precociousness than Ali, her character in the musical, who doesn’t start taking piano lessons until the age of 17. By then, Alicia already had a recording contract
But One9 also threads the film with grainy videos showing street fights in the Hell’s Kitchen of the 1990s, the raw footage a more convincing portrait of a dangerous neighborhood than was possible (or desirable?) in a $22 million Broadway production.
