PATTI’S RAP IS HUGE FUN by Brian Viner
You’ll be swept along by the wit, warmth and energy of this exhilarating film and its new star. Just try to ignore the swearing
THERE is no shortage of movies about working-class kids who sing or dance and dream of hitting the big time. In 2014 even Clint Eastwood got in on the act, with Jersey Boys, the true story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.
Well, Patti Cake$ whisks us to exactly the same part of blue-collar New Jersey, the grim outskirts of Newark. But this time there’s just a single, fictional Jersey girl: an overweight, strawberry blonde 23-year-old called Patricia Dombrowski, played with engaging verve by Australian actress Danielle Macdonald. Patricia lives in a squalid apartment with her similarly outsize, hard-drinking mother Barb (Bridget Everett) and invalid grandmother, Nana (Cathy Moriarty, still a scene- stealer 37 years after her Academy Award nomination for Raging Bull).
Her life has yielded nothing and promises nothing. Her old high-school contemporaries call her Dumbo and tease her for being fat. Meanwhile, she works in a seedy karaoke bar trying to cobble together the money to pay off Nana’s healthcare debts.
But she also, albeit largely in her own mind, goes by the names Patti Cake$ and Killa P. They would be stage names if only she had a stage.
What she does have is a prodigious, as yet untapped, talent for writing and performing rap music. In a marvellous scene, she uses it in the street against one of her chief tormentors, just as a gunfighter in a Western might whip out his Smith & Wesson.
Patti fantasises that her raps will propel her into the spotlight but her reveries of becoming a famous hiphop artist are repeatedly punctured not just by the abusive locals, but even by her own mother, who belittles her for being generally useless.
Barb herself once nearly had a singing career until an unplanned pregnancy — Patti — went and ruined it. She has no idea about her daughter’s dreams. Only her own matter. She is simultaneously a hasbeen and a wannabe.
HAPPIly,
Patti has a best friend Jheri ( Siddharth Dhananjay) who sings with her and believes in her implicitly. He has a day job as a pharmacist but is her perfect musical foil — their rapport reminded me a little of James Corden and Sheridan Smith joyfully rapping in the TV comedy Gavin And Stacey.
Our unlikely duo then become an even unlikelier trio when they embrace a creepy-looking black musician, with a glass eye and some very alarming piercings, who calls himself ‘The Antichrist’.
Usefully, he operates a recording studio in his tumbledown shack deep in the woods, and while he’s hardly George Martin, he can nudge them closer to the big time. Or, more accurately, the medium-sized time.
Whether rap is your thing or not — and I confess that it’s not mine — writer- director Geremy Jasper, a director of music videos, here making his feature film debut, does a fine job of conveying its urgent, angry, poetic rhythm. Despite all the profanity, which rather goes with the hip-hop territory, Patti Cake$ is full of wit and warmth and heart.
I enjoyed it hugely, and didn’t mind at all that it abides by so many of the conventions, or clichés if you prefer, of the classic rags- to- musical stardom movie. Besides, Jasper neatly subverts one or two of them.
A host of terrific performances keep his film thrumming along, helped by some sharp dialogue. ‘Why can’t you act your age?’ says Patti to her embarrassing mother.
‘And why can’t you act your race?’ replies the aptly-named Barb. She is
not the only character to point out that hip-hop is hardly a traditional musical habitat for fat, white, ginger girls.
But then that’s what gives this exhilarating film its singularity in a crowded field of movies about talented youngsters chasing their dreams.
So let’s hope that life now imitates art, and that Macdonald’s first leading role turns her into the star she deserves to be.
The Limehouse Golem has no shortage of established stars, led by Bill Nighy, who stepped in when the original choice for leading man, Alan Rickman, became too ill. Nighy plays a Victorian detective, Inspector Kildare, who is investigating a series of grisly murders in East London.
Kildare is a keen-eyed copper whose career has been held back by rumours that he ‘isn’t the marrying kind’.
He has now been transferred from the theft and fraud department to supervise the murder enquiry, but only because his superiors need a scapegoat, someone to blame when inevitably the case confounds him. It has already baffled Scotland Yard’s finest.
SO
KILDARE certainly has a challenge on his hands. Someone has been committing terrible, Jack the Ripper-style crimes in Limehouse, and has acquired a nickname inspired by a sinister figure in eastern European Jewish folklore. The story is based on a 1994 novel by Peter Ackroyd, and it ingeniously weaves together fact and fiction. One of the suspects is Karl Marx (Henry Goodman).
Kildare and his eager sidekick ( Daniel Mays) must also investigate a domestic poisoning, in which a man called John Cree has apparently been done in by his wife (Olivia Cooke), a former music hall star once known as Little Lizzie.
Standing trial for murder, Mrs Cree tells her story in flashback, thereby introducing the flamboyant comic Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) and a stage manager played by Eddie Marsan who falls some way short of being as nice as he seems. Soon, it is clear that the poisoning and the Golem murders are connected.
Director Juan Carlos Medina, and writer Jane Goldman, have great fun with this, ramping up the melodrama to such an extent that at times I was reminded of the Two Ronnies pastiche, Inspector Corner Of The Yard.
With plots tripping over subplots, it’s not a film to be taken too seriously, but if you like camped-up Victorian excess, then I recommend it heartily.