THE DOCUMENTARY IS NOT ABOUT LUKE

Luke is sixteen when the camera finds him in the back of a Vauxhall Corsa outside McDonald's, wearing trainers worth slightly more than the passenger door. The documentary is not about Luke. It is about Callum, who sells trainers on Instagram and describes himself as an entrepreneur. Then Callum casually mentions their Bath postcode-BA2-and Luke hears a stage name. At first, BA2 is mostly an expensive hoodie, borrowed slang and an impressive ability to avoid actual confrontation. Beneath the posturing, though, Luke has real talent. He loves rhythm, works obsessively and will spend four hours repairing a rhyme nobody else noticed. As the cameras keep rolling, the joke slowly changes. Bedroom freestyles become hit records. A protest track about a mother carrying a pram up the stairs of a Twerton flat becomes a TikTok phenomenon. Luke reaches the UK Top Five, plays Glastonbury and eventually returns home in a car expensive enough to make the old Corsa feel imaginary. The same footage catches what success costs: a first kiss turned into a disposable lyric; Amy becoming "a girl from back home"; Callum becoming "the merch guy"; friendships reduced to schedules and card-reader totals. Across three decades come fame, marriage, pregnancy loss, addiction, divorce-and the particular cruelty of staying friends with someone you never quite stopped loving. Told through interviews, phone recordings, TikToks, performance footage, outtakes, headlines and complete original songs, The Documentary Is Not About Luke is a darkly funny narrative poem about class, ambition, friendship, love and the uncomfortable distance between telling the truth and living it. Luke learns how to tell the truth in music. That does not mean the people he hurt owe him an ending. Contains strong language, sexual content, drug addiction, grief and pregnancy loss.