Bridget Everett leaps from cabaret to screen
Fifteen minutes into the new film “Patti Cake$,” Bridget Everett slips in through a side door of a seedy tavern to music straight out of a spaghetti western at high noon. Behind the counter, her bartender daughter sizes up the situation: “Christ.”
“Line up your ma a bomb,” Everett’s character says. “I gotta grease these pipes.”
Clicking her French tips against her glass, she demands two more shots of Jagermeister and proposes a toast: “To family, right? Blood is thicker than Jager.”
In a single scene, that’s everything you need to know about Everett, the once and future dynamo of New York’s downtown cabaret scene and now a natural star on the silver screen. She’s in two films this month, “Patti Cake$” and “Fun Mom Dinner,” and nearly walks away with both in her pocket.
A year ago you’d have found the 45-year-old singer and entertainer at Joe’s Pub, the beloved New York venue where she holds audiences hostage — lovingly, mind you — with her raunchy but heart-rending theatrics. On a typical night, some poor stranger inevitably ends up either licking whipped cream off her legs or perhaps suspending her in midair a la Superman.
Or maybe you’ve already seen Everett alongside her pal Amy Schumer, who has given Everett memorable parts in “Trainwreck” and her Comedy Central series “Inside Amy Schumer.”
Her girl-gone-wild role in “Fun Mom Dinner” was right in her wheelhouse, but “Patti Cake$” reveals Everett’s impressive range as a dramatic actress. As Barb, the mother of the titular Patti Cake$ (Danielle Macdonald), Everett portrays a hard-bitten survivor, a singer whose dreams of rock stardom were dashed long before her daughter’s rise as a rapper.
It’s a delicious part that Everett devours like those Jagermeister shots she pounds in her opening scene. As she makes the rounds on late-night TV and shows up on red carpets, Everett is finally proving the mantra she’s been lifting from LL Cool J for years: Dreams don’t have deadlines.