Notorious charts the remarkable rise of Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace - who, in just a few short years, shot from th etough streets of Brooklyn to the heights of hip hop legend. Peeling back his mythic image eleven years after his tragic death, Notorious reveals the tumultuous and all-too-brief journey of a blazingly talented , fiercely determined young man whose unforgettable rap stories of inner city street life, with their raw truth and vivid rhymes, became emblamatic of a whole generation's brutal reality and its dreams of escaping it for something bigger.

The story follows the young Biggie (portrayed by Wallace's real-life son Christopher Jordan Wallace as a youngster and Brooklyn rapper Jamal Woolard as an adult) from his surprising youth as a Catholic school honour student whose proud mother (Angel Bassett) tries to keep him off the street corners to his years as a tough teenage drug dealer, and then to his life-changing move into young fatherhood, as his girlfriend Jan (Julia Pace Mitchell) gives birth to his daughter, prompting him to go on a mission to provide for his child by any means - legal or not. But everything changes when a "freestyle" rap tape that Biggie created just for fun ends up with B.I.G. Daddy Kane's DJ Mister Cee (Edwin Freeman), and eventually in the hands of ambitious rap impressario Sean "Puffy" Combs (Derek Luke), whose marketing savvy and production genius transform Biggie into a cultural sensation almost overnight.

Now, with his career taking off into superstar territory, Biggie finds himself with "mo' money, mo' problems" and is under all kinds of new pressures. His managers, Wayne Barrow (C. Malik Whitfield), and Mark Pitts (Kevin Phillip), attempt to keep the young man's feet on the ground and mind in the studio, as he juggles the demands of recording, fatherhood and marriage to fellow Bad Boy artist Faith Evans (Antonique Smith) not to mention his complicated friendship with fellow Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Kimberly "Lil' Kim" Jones (Naturi Naughton) and the increasingly heated rivalry with West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie).

But just as Biggie starts to come into true manhood and solidify his musical legacy as the true creator of one of hip-hop's gretest bodies of work, fate has other plans.