WITH ‘PATTI CAKE$’
THE New Jersey of rock songdom is a place to be celebrated and escaped from – at least according to the Garden State’s most revered music god, Bruce Springsteen.
In song after song, “The Boss” has written – unironically – in praise of Jersey’s turnpikes, refineries and boardwalks, while in his monster hit Rosalita, singing in the persona of a guitar-slinging saviour on a motorbike, promising to rescue his titular gal-pal from the “swamps of Jersey”, now that a record company has given him, as the singer says, “a big advance”.
That rock dream, according to director Geremy Jasper, is so last century.
Rap, for one thing, has replaced rock as the perceived ticket out for today’s kids. “Guitars just don’t matter anymore,” said Jasper, who recently promoted Patti Cake$, his feel-good feature debut about an aspiring hip-hop star named Patricia Dombrowski, set in what the director facetiously calls “the mythical Jersey town of Springsteen, USA”.
What’s more, today’s young women don’t need rescuing, thank you very much. That’s the premise of Patti, which garnered the Brooklyn-based filmmaker a Grand Jury Prize nomination at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and a spot on Variety’s 10 directors-to-watch list.
The film has also earned accolades for its breakout star, Danielle Macdonald, 26, an Australian who not only mastered, in the title role, a more-than-credible North Jersey accent, but the skills and swagger of a seasoned rapper.
All this, for someone who said she previously couldn’t even sing – let alone rap – and whose prior exposure to the hip-hop genre consisted largely of the Aussie group Hilltop Hoods.
According to Jasper, it had been pure luck that led him to Macdonald, whose IMDb headshot was all he had to go on when he knew had found his star.
Before that, Macdonald’s highest-profile work had been a small part in the 2013 eco-terrorist indie thriller The East.
“It was like winning multiple lotteries,” said Jasper, who grew up in the North Jersey suburb of Hillsdale, rapping in talent shows from the age of eight. He had been inspired to write Patti Cake$ by his experience living at home after college in the 1990s and dreaming of bigger and better things.
Like many others, he sought escape through a band, the Fever, whose musical evolution Jasper described as jumping from artsy, Nick Cave-esque garage rock to post-punk dance rock to music that evoked the film scores of Federico Fellini’s composer Nino Rota and David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti.
But he never wanted to make a movie about himself. Such navel-gazing, he said, “just doesn’t interest me”.
Jasper had a very specific image in mind for his alter ego – a heavyset woman in her 20s who’s been rapping her whole life.
“I took one look at Danielle’s picture and I said, ‘That’s Patti’. If you could do a drawing out of my imagination and put it on a paper, that was her. She looked like Angela Maragliano and other girls that I grew up with. And she was beautiful. I’m all about faces. I could tell she could be tough, sexy, vulnerable and childlike,” he said.
Macdonald had not been so sure: “What the hell does he see in me, exactly?”
What followed was: A year-anda-half practising covers of rap hits in front of the mirror; working out an elaborate notation system for breath control; four or five sessions with a dialect coach; binge-watching The Sopranos; and hours spent listening to tapes of New Jersey women talking about, as Jasper puts it, “their shore house and where they bury the saint in the backyard”.
And that’s when the confidence came? “No,” said Macdonald. “The confidence didn’t come.”
“That was the problem,” said Jasper. Enter Skyzoo (rapper Gregory Skykler Taylor), a rap coach hired one month before shooting to find a way to take all of Macdonald’s preparations – and the butterflies in her stomach – and get to her to forget them.
Or, rather, to make them Patti’s. “My nerves went along with Patti’s nerves,” Macdonald said.
For the actress, who’s relocated from her home town – a beach suburb of Sydney – to Los Angeles, Patti Cake$ is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. (She’s about to start shooting Dumplin’, an adaptation of the 2015 Young Adult best-seller about a plus-size beauty pageant contestant, with Jennifer Aniston as her mother.)
For Jasper, the movie is a fairytale version of his life, which in his case took a little longer to find its happy ending than it does for Patti.
Stuck in the Springsteenian swamps of Jersey in the 1990s, he said, he had yet to find himself.
Jasper said he recently ran into an old college classmate, who told him, with a tone of astonishment: “I never knew you wanted to be a musician. I never even knew you wanted to be a film-maker. You just seemed very shy.”
Now, the whole world knows.