‘Patti Cake$’ an energetic story

‘Patti Cake$’ tells a familiar type of story — about a white rapper — its energy and other attributes help set it apart

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Young person from wrong side of the tracks has showbiz aspirations. Economic obstacles, crappy home life and public embarrassments stand, seemingly insurmountably, in the way of realizing them. But the kid has talent and drive, even if they decide to give up several times throughout the movie.

“Patti Cake$,” the story of a would-be New Jersey rapper, indeed comes with all of that 8-Mileage on it. But there’s a commitment and exuberance to music vid director Geremy Jasper’s first feature that makes it all seem, if hardly fresh, at least creatively alive.

Shot with style, the movie’s real strength is its cast. Out front is Australian actress Danielle Macdonald as Patricia Dombrowski, a white girl of size who wants nothing more than to make it as a rapper. She spits rhymes well and goes by myriad monikers: Killa P, the film’s title, Dumbo by cruel rivals and just mean boys, and my personal favorite, White Trish. Patti lives with a dissolute, failed singer mother (Bridget Everett, who can really belt out a rock anthem when conditions require), doesn’t make enough at her demeaning bartending job to pay her grandma’s medical bills (that’s “Raging Bull’s” Cathy Moriarty in the wheelchair) and is, y’know, white (fortunately, just as a viewer is getting fed up with Patti’s oblivious racial appropriation, the movie itself smacks her in the face with it).

Macdonald is mostly mesmerizing through all of this boilerplate, as are the other women in the cast. Siddharth Dhananjay and Mamoudou Athie are amusing as the male members of Patti’s crew, though Jasper’s script takes them rather less seriously than it does Patti. That’s fine, though, because Macdonald is spunky and heartbreaking and flowing and vulnerable and a handful and often quite beautiful enough to carry “Patti Cake$” through all of its soiled blue collar grit, escapist dream sequences and musical performances both disastrous and transcendent.

You’ve seen it all before, but you haven’t seen how “Patti Cake$” does it.

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX Siddharth Dhananjay and Danielle Macdonald appear in a scene from “Patti Cake$.”