8 Mile (15)

The word on the street

It has taken some time but, with 8 Mile, the penny has finally dropped. Indifferent to his music and bored by his chest-thumping displays of aggression towards mom, wife and the rest of the world, I had tended to side with PJ O'Rourke on the subject of Eminem ("How did God, with all his tornadoes, manage to miss this particular trailer park?"). And that aversion might have held steady had it not been for this downbeat, semi-autobiographical movie about the rap star who, under Curtis Hanson's shrewd direction, reveals himself to be, if no great shakes as an actor, then a wordsmith of quicksilver ingenuity.

As the story of a gifted kid itching to break out from the confines of a tough working-class culture, the film is of a piece with Saturday Night Fever. Just as John Travolta's twinkle-toed Brooklyn boy lives for the weekend when he can go out dancing, Jimmy Smith Jr (Eminem) only becomes himself when he's rapping, either inside his head as he scribbles down a lyric or else letting loose on an impromptu scat of rhyming couplets. Jimmy lives in Detroit on the wrong side of the tracks – the 8 Mile Road – with his fragile trailer-trash mom (Kim Basinger) and little sister; he knows there must be more than this narrow, compromised life, but he's so low on self-confidence that he can't seize an opportunity when it's offered to him. His nickname is "Rabbit", and like Updike's white-bread anti-hero, he's an unstable mixture of talent, frustration and American solitariness. His DJ friend Future (Mekhi Phifer) – black, like most of his crew – rates Jimmy as an original and lines up a slot for him at their local nightspot, The Shelter, where aspirant rappers vie over who can deal the best satirical drubbing to his opponent.

Such contests have an Old World precedent, notably in Patrice Leconte's costume drama Ridicule, where the powdered dandies at the court of Versailles stood and fired epigrammatic barbs, the object being to puncture another's reputation beyond repair. While they don't wear periwigs and gaiters in downtown Detroit, the basic idea remains the same. On his big night Jimmy freezes, and the audience, which acts as judge, jeers him off stage. Eminem hasn't anything like Travolta's insolent charm or physical presence, but Curtis Hanson has done some work with his star, shaping his molten core of resentment into something that feels alive on screen: I don't think you could call it great acting, but it's more than mere pretending. With his hooded eyes and hooded sweatshirt, Eminem doesn't give much away. He hits a note of tight-lipped sullenness and more or less stays there; he rarely smiles, and his few moments of tenderness are reserved for his sister, Lily, and a pert blonde, Alex (Brittany Murphy), who, like him, dreams of escaping these sorry streets.

Written by Scott Silver, the movie doesn't travel at quite the pace you expect, and it's significant as much for what it leaves out as for what it puts in. The rundown neighbourhood Jimmy lives in is mixed race, though there seems little sign of racial tension: this might be because he is that rare thing in movies, a white who's as poor as a black. The main current of antagonism appears to swirl around class rather than colour, most obviously in the disdain of the affluent suburbs beyond 8 Mile and the later revelation that a supposed tough-guy rapper actually had a private education. Hip hop's notorious affiliation with criminality is also conspicuous by its absence: Jimmy and his friends burn down a derelict house, but this was the site of a young girl's rape – the house had it coming. Drugs are invisible too, and the one time a gun is fired its purpose is essentially comic: the most abject of Jimmy's pals does himself a mischief after leaving the safety off.

Indeed, for a guy who's supposedly a bogeyman to middle-class America, Eminem is anything but a threat in this new guise. Jimmy's angry all right, but he's not some rabid prole monster looking to tear down the city. His rage, more personal than antisocial, is directed against what's immediately around him; his mom, her sleazeball boyfriend, the empty bravado of his pals, his crappy job at a metal-pressing plant; this is the raw material on which his rapping catches fire. He even turns his insecurity to advantage, pre-empting one of his rapper adversaries with a litany of his own humiliations and making it impossible to "tell those people somethin' they don't know 'bout me". Self-loathing has become a kind of self-defence.

One is caught between admiring the film's refusal to feed off Eminem's reputation as a public enemy – its refusal to sensationalise – and wondering if there's much of a drama going on here. The "journey" Jimmy makes is apparently towards the deal that will launch his career and offer him a way out of his dead-end life, yet it's a dead-end life that takes up most of the screen time, and it's not what you'd call gripping. Hanson is good on little things such as the ritual greeting that starts with a handshake and segues into a gentle bumping of right shoulders, and the film jolts into life whenever a rapper spontaneously breaks into rhyme (and makes it sound improvised).

The best scene rises up from the mundane setting of the factory lunch-queue, when a woman who has been rapping about the awfulness of the food is topped by an abusive co-worker – then Jimmy steps in and tops him with a weird but compelling rap that includes the line: "He may be gay, but you're a faggot." It doesn't entirely make sense, but it goes down a storm. This street invective lights up what's often a very dour and drab-looking movie (think Toxteth on a rainy day) and may give pause to those, like me, who thought Eminem was just another punk riding a fluke. It doesn't sound like something I could love, but it does sound like talent.