“Sometimes you love people that hurt you simply because they were the first to love you at all,” Eddie Huang says early in Vice Is Broke, his new documentary on the rise and implosion of Vice. It’s a line that becomes the emotional thread of the film. Because if Vice was selling “cool,” what it really trafficked in was belonging — the thrill of being seen, even by something that would later betray you.
Vice began in Montreal in the 1990s as a free magazine fueled by crackling energy, irreverent humor, and literary lawlessness. Its founders — Shane Smith, Gavin McInnes, and Suroosh Alvi — weren’t chasing journalism so much as chasing an attitude. By the time the magazine moved to New York, the punk bars, crack dens, and the warehouse it operated out of became part of its mythology. From across the East River, Brooklyn was becoming the “coolest 20 blocks in the world,” and Vice was its loudest megaphone. Vice was never polished; it was raw, loud, and sometimes ugly, but it mattered because it gave misfit artists the chance to make something that didn’t exist anywhere else.
Huang pulls in many of those voices. Amy Kellner, the magazine’s first female writer, grew up Orthodox Jewish and ran toward Vice because she wanted to do the strangest, most frightening things she could. She recalls the freedom of publishing wild, unfiltered pieces like The Guide to Female Ejaculation at a time when no one else would. Yet she also remembers McInnes using a Hitler doll to “knight” new Vice inductees. That contradiction — belonging and mockery entwined — runs through each person’s story, and through Vice itself.
Jesse Pearson helped shape the magazine’s voice, giving it the sharp, ironic edge that Huang later describes as making Vice feel like the “wildest literary magazine.” But Pearson also left when Vice turned its lens into something darker and more marketable — “kids with guns,” as he put it — trading satire for spectacle. David Choe, whose art and comics once embodied Vice’s honesty, tells Huang how much those years meant to him while warning that Vice had a way of consuming and discarding people.
Huang, too, is one of those people. Both narrator and subject, he’s still wrestling with what Vice gave him, and what it took away. Owed hundreds of thousands from Huang’s World — a documentary series hosted by Huang and aired on the magazine’s television network — and a new father, he gave up the money in exchange for full rights to his show and the breaking of his non-disclosure agreement — a sacrifice that made this documentary possible.
On screen, Huang’s enormously likeable: telling stories with sharp humour while keeping the real emotion just under the surface. He recalls the ring Smith gave him when he joined Vice, calling it corny, though his expression betrays otherwise.
That’s Huang’s paradox. He could’ve been the Asian Guy Fieri of the Food Network, crocs on fire and grinning on cable, but instead he chose Vice — a gamble that both made him and broke him.
Anthony Bourdain, one of his earliest mentors, warned him about that trade-off, showing him not only how food television could break barriers but also how Vice reduced entire countries to clichés of guns, drugs, and chaos. Huang carries that tension with him: magnetic on screen, but unflinching about the scars Vice left. Vice was different — brilliant, reckless, impossible to walk away from, even when you knew better. Huang’s right: nothing will ever be like Vice again.
The first half of Vice Is Broke captures this tension best. It’s intimate, sharp, and alive with Huang’s voice as he interviews the people who once defined the magazine-turned-media-group, even McInnes himself — now the leader of the Proud Boys, infamous for his Fox News appearances, and still playing the provocateur (White supremacists? Harmless). By the time Huang sits across from him, McInnes is insisting on positions so far outside of reason that Huang wonders if there’s anything real left underneath.
But if McInnes embodies provocation, Smith embodies seduction. A modern day P.T. Barnum, Shane convinced a warehouse of outcasts they were building the biggest media empire in the world — and for a time, they were. Vice did things no one else could, like throwing Dennis Rodman into North Korea, filming with ISIS, landing an HBO deal that gave their reporting a global stage. Everyone, even Disney, wanted in. The tragedy, as Huang tells it, is that Shane might have been right, but ambition turned that need for belonging into a brand that could be scaled, marketed, and, in the end, destroyed.
The problem is that the latter half of the documentary suffers the same fate as Vice itself when it shifts from people to numbers and loses its intimacy. Suddenly, we’re in boardrooms, watching the Disney buyout talks unravel and hearing about billion-dollar valuations that never quite added up. Instead of leaning into the insight Huang and his interviewees could offer, we see how Vice, once the embodiment of “cool,” was reduced to vape campaigns and SEO traffic — a familiar story of corporate greed.
At its best, Vice Is Broke shows the contradiction at Vice’s core. For all its swagger about counterculture, Vice was built on something almost embarrassingly ordinary: the desire to belong. People who didn’t fit anywhere else found in Vice a place that said, “Yes, your voice matters.”
That longing for connection gave the magazine its edge, and it’s what made the betrayals cut so deep. And it’s why Smith looms so large over the film — the only one who refused to appear except through Instagram messages with Huang. Even now, you sense Huang trying to understand him, as if some part of him still believes in the allure Vice built in the first place. It’s that refusal to tie things up neatly — to say either “Vice was everything” or “Vice was nothing” — that makes Vice Is Broke resonate. The film is messy, exhilarating, frustrating, but always human.
The truth is Vice mattered — it mattered to the people who gave their youth to it, who wrote stories no one else would publish, who believed belonging to something raw and imperfect was better than being excluded entirely. And for a time, the world couldn’t look away.
