“Patti Cake$” tells the story of an unexpected rap performer.
Patti Cake$ (R) opens Friday, Aug. 25, in Bay Area theaters.
When you meet Geremy Jasper, with his shaggy shoulder-length blond hair, black jeans and mellow manner, he looks and sounds every bit the Brooklyn video and film artist he is now, and a more grown-up version of the indie-rock band frontman he was in his 20s.
So it comes as a surprise to hear Jasper describe the title character in his new film “Patti Cake$” — a plus-size, workingclass Jersey girl with a rap music obsession — as “about as autobiographical as I could get. At Patti’s core, she’s me at 23,” Jasper, 41, said during a recent visit to the San Francisco International Film Festival, which screened his spirited new hip-hop movie as its centerpiece film. “Patti Cake$” opens in San Francisco on Aug. 25.
“Patti has the same burning desire I had to do something, to be someone,” said Jasper, who based his “Patti Cake$” screenplay on the 18 months he spent living in his parents’ suburban Hillsdale, N.J., home after graduating from Wesleyan College.
Just like his fictional alterego Patricia Dombrowski — a.k.a. Killa P, a.k.a. Patti Cake$ — played by Australian breakout star Danielle Macdonald, Jasper was playing music in his parents’ basement, tending to a sick grandparent upstairs, working odd bartending and catering gigs and “trying to make music every chance I got, driving into Paterson to record with friends — and it was not going well,” he said. “I know what it’s like to feel trapped, that you have something to tell the world, and potential no one has seen yet.”
Eventually Jasper’s band the Fever did take off. He started touring and, when the group broke up, started working with his college friend Benh Zeitlin (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”). Zeitlin encouraged Jasper to write the story of the legend-in-her-own-mind Jersey girl he’d been kicking around for years.
“I had the idea for Patti a very long time ago,” said Jasper. “I’ve been obsessed with rap music since I was 8 years old, and I remember driving around with a friend when Eminem was exploding and I said, ‘There’s going to be a big, tough white girl from here one day who makes it as a rap star.’ Then I kind of filed it in the back of my mind.”
To complete a script to submit to the Sundance Lab (where Quentin Tarantino wound up being his first script adviser), Jasper channeled all the amped-up yearning from his postcollegiate slump into his portrait of Patti, an unlikely heroine and even more unlikely
“I wanted a surreal, dreamlike, ‘Wizard of Oz,’ Fellini quality to this. Pitching the film early on we called it ‘8½ Mile.’ ” Geremy Jasper, writer-director
rap star. Neighborhood thugs call her “Dumbo” and “White Precious.” Her mother, Barb (Bridget Everett), who gave up her own dreams of being a singer, drinks too much and belittles her daughter’s love of hip-hop, asking: “Why can’t you act your race?”
But Patti has a stalwart best friend (newcomer Siddharth Dhananjay), a musician boyfriend (Mamoudou Athie), and a phenomenal gift for writing rhymes (“her secret superpower,” said Jasper) which she hopes will punch her ticket out of the strip-mall suburbs.
The film’s dreamy sequences, like an early scene in which Patti levitates down the street, music thumping in her headphones, show “her inner life no one sees, and how she has all this bravado when she’s rapping. She can fake that confidence and bring it to the surface when she needs to, but still has a lot of insecurities inside,” said
Macdonald. “I really connected with that.”
The 26-year-old Sydney-born actress, who had appeared in Aussie made-for-television movies, and an episode of “American Horror Story,” said she was “terrified at first” to take on the role of Patti. “When I first read it, it seemed impossible. I’m not even musical. I was the one trying to hide in the back of chorus.”
Macdonald worked on her New Jersey accent for two months before shooting, and immersed herself in hip-hop, practicing rapid-fire Nicki Minaj and Notorious B.I.G. lyrics alone in her closet.
“When I moved to Los Angeles (at 18), people definitely told me, ‘It won’t happen, give it up, get a real job,’ stuff like that,” she said. “Patti has people all around her telling her what she can’t do. But you just have to believe in yourself. I never thought otherwise.”
Even before the release of “Patti Cake$,” strong early reviews have helped jump-start Macdonald’s career. She signed with the powerful Hollywood agency CAA and landed the lead role, opposite Jennifer Aniston, in the new movie “White Girl Problems.”
Jasper said hip-hop movies like Eminem’s “8 Mile” and “Hustle & Flow” were influential, but “they’re not me, not my style. I wanted a surreal, dreamlike, ‘Wizard of Oz,’ Fellini quality to this. Pitching the film early on we called it ‘8½ Mile.’ ”
When Tarantino gave feedback on an early version of the script, “the draft was so insane that he asked me if the whole second half of the film was one long dream sequence,” Jasper said with a laugh. “But he also said this, and it was so helpful: ‘Make this smaller and its world more contained so you can actually make it one day. This is your story, and only one person knows all the details and can tell it — you.’ ”