An unexpected new star is born
THE NEW Jersey of rock songdom is a place to be both 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 also, 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 boasts, “a big advance”.
That rock dream, according to 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 any more,” says Jasper, who was town recently to promote Patti Cake$, his feel-good feature debut about an aspiring hip hop star named Patricia Dombrowski, set in what the director facetiously calls “the mythical Jersey town of Springsteen, USA”.
What’s more, today’s young women don’t need rescuing, thank you very much. That’s the premise of Patti, which garnered the 41-year-old Brooklyn-based film-maker a Grand Jury Prize nomination at this year’s Sundance and a spot on Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch list.
The film has also earned accolades for its breakout star, Danielle Macdonald, a 26-year-old Australian who not only mastered, in the title role, a more-than-credible North Jersey accent, but the skills and swagger of a seasoned rapper. All this, for someone who, while in town with Jasper to hype the film, says she previously couldn’t even sing – let alone rap – and whose prior exposure to the hip hop genre consisted largely of the Aussie group Hilltop Hoods.
According to Jasper, it was pure luck that led him to Macdonald, whose Internet Movie Database headshot was all he had to go on. He knew had found his star while workshopping his film at the 2014 Sundance Directors Lab. Before that, Macdonald’s highest-profile work was a small part in the ensemble cast of the 2013 eco-terrorist indie thriller The East.
“It was like winning multiple lotteries,” says Jasper, who grew up in North Jersey, rapping in talent shows from the age of eight or nine. He was inspired to write Patti Cake$ by his experience of living at home after college in the 1990s and dreaming of bigger and better things.
Like many, he sought escape through a band, The Fever, whose musical evolution Jasper describes 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 says, “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.’she was beautiful. I’m all about faces. I could tell she could be tough, sexy, vulnerable and childlike.”
Macdonald herself was not so sure. “What the hell does he see in me, exactly?” she recalls thinking.
What followed was 18 months practising covers of rap hits in front of the mirror; four or five sessions with a dialect coach; binge-watching The Sopranos; and hours spent listening to tapes of New Jersey women talking.
And that’s when the confidence came? “No,” says Macdonald. “The confidence didn’t come.”
“That was the problem,” Jasper says. 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. “My nerves went along with Patti’s nerves,” she says. – The Washington Post