Questlove uses photo of Will Smith in Sly Stone documentary 3 years after slap overshadowed his Oscar win

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is interrogating the burden that comes with Black fame, and he's reflecting on his eventful 2022 Oscar win to do it.

Three years ago, the Roots frontman won big, scoring his first Academy Award for his music documentary Summer of Soul. But mere moments before he took to the stage to accept it, Will Smith and Chris Rock had a very memorable confrontation there, later dubbed "The Slap." The headline-making moment has not only gone down in pop culture history — it also shows up in Questlove's latest directorial project, Sly Lives! (A.k.a. the Burden of Black Genius).

The new documentary, which showed at the Sundance Film Festival this past week, examines the life and legacy of the charismatic singer-songwriter Sly Stone, who led the group Sly and the Family Stone to groundbreaking heights throughout the 1960s and '70s until his struggles with substance abuse forced him into early retirement in 1987. At the end of the film, Questlove emphasizes the fact that Black artists face extraordinary levels of pressure and scrutiny — leaving little room for error — with a montage of other artists and entertainers who endured similar falls from grace.

The montage, which puts a photographic black strip across each of its subject's eyes, includes Smith at the 94th Academy Awards, the 2022 ceremony during which he both won Best Actor and famously slapped Rock.

Representatives for Questlove and Will Smith did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's requests for comment.

Related: Of memes and men: Finding — and losing — the humor in Will Smith's Oscars slap

Speaking to IndieWire on the heels of the film's Sundance premiere, Questlove said the question of whether or not to include Smith in the montage sparked a complicated but "important" conversation.

"How do we handle this? What frame do we show? That was probably a rare moment of multiple sabotagings happening in one moment — that was lightning in a bottle," he said. "But we had to give examples [of what we were trying to express], and I think it was tastefully done. That was definitely a moment in history where you see this idea of: 'You get what you came for, but what happens when you get what you thought you wanted? What happens to your life then?'"

What should have been a high point for Smith — his first Oscar win, for his role as Venus and Serena Williams' father, Richard, in King Richard — was overshadowed by the slap, which occurred after Rock poked fun at Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, prompting Smith to take the stage and strike Rock before shouting, "Keep my wife's name out of your f---ing mouth," and returning to his seat.

When he took the stage later that night to accept his Oscar, Smith apologized for the clash (he would continue to do so in the days that followed), and also quoted something fellow nominee Denzel Washington told him backstage that evening: "What Denzel said to me a few moments ago, he said, 'At your highest moment, that's when the devil comes for you.'"

Though he accepted his award for Best Documentary on stage minutes after Smith hit Rock, Questlove joked that he wasn't totally "present" when the slap happened because he had been meditating during the commercial break.

"They tell you ahead of time, 'This is your category,' and so in that moment you're either going to be full of anxiety or, like for me, I've been doing transcendental meditation the past couple years," he said in an interview on The Tonight Show afterwards. "So when I opened my eyes I didn't realize — 'Why is everyone so quiet?' Like I literally was not present for that whole entire moment, and as I'm walking to the stage I'm kind of putting two and two together. And I only realized it was a real moment about three seconds before I started speaking words. I was not present at all."

Questlove echoes Washington's thoughts in Sly Lives!, as fans and artists reckon with the turn Stone's career took. "You were at that place that every musician wants to be," one journalist tells Stone in a trailer for the film. "You get there… and you blow it."

Elsewhere, in talking-head interviews, artists reflect on the unique pressures Stone dealt with as a public figure. "The world's watching you, analyzing you," says one commentator. "Sly was kind of the first Black artist to go through that so publicly. If you're Sly Stone, there is no blueprint for what comes next."

Sly Lives! (A.k.a. the Burden of Black Genius) hits Hulu on Feb. 13.

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