If “Patti Cake$” were a song, it would be the kind you hear on the radio and get excited about singing along with, until you realize it’s not the song you thought, but another one that sounds just like it; and because you liked the first song, you like this one, too, and after hearing it a few times you start singing along with the other one, too. Written and directed by filmmaker and musician Geremy Jasper, who also did the film’s original soundtrack, it’s the story of of a plus-sized, working class white teenager, Patti “Dumbo” Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald, an Australian actress making a sensational American debut) who works a series of menial jobs while trying to make it as a rapper with the encouragement of her hip-hop-loving best friend Jhen (Siddharth Dhananjay). Patti encounters prejudice on two fronts, her weight and her race. People constantly make fun of how fat she is and how white she is, sometimes at the same time, depending on the situation. There’s also a strong element of flat-out sexism in young men’s responses to her, whether they’re black, white or brown. A big white girl can’t make it as a rapper, they tell her. The very idea is ridiculous. Of course they’re wrong, because this movie is “8 Mile,” set in the post-industrial jumble of northern New Jersey (Bruce Springsteen country; he even has a song on the soundtrack). It’s also “Purple Rain,” especially when the film shifts focus to Patti’s fraught relationship with her mother Barb, brilliantly played by actress and singer Bridget Everett; like Prince’s “Kid” in his 1984 movie breakthrough, who struggled to define himself apart from his alcoholic wife-beating father (Clarence Williams III), a failed pianist, Patti is simultaneously inspired and embarrassed by Barb, a onetime rock singer who was on the verge of a commercial breakthrough when she got pregnant with Patti and obviously holds her existence against her at the same time that she sincerely expresses love for her. The scenes between Barb and Patti are the best and most powerful element of “Patti Cake$.” Everett’s history of using her own considerable weight and height as defiant comic fuel means she was perfectly cast in this role before she could even open her mouth and show you what a superb actress she is. If you saw “Purple Rain,” “”8 Mile” or half a dozen other films about struggling musicians, you know how this story will resolve: with Patti trying and failing to navigate one road to success (getting a mix tape into the hands of a famous rapper) only to manage a 98-yard dash to victory anyway, via a local rap competition. You know that the support of her chain-smoking, handicapped grandmother (Cathy Moriarty) will be the wind beneath Patti’s wings (and a financial boost, too) and that there’ll be plenty of salty-adorable scenes between them as the story unfolds, and that grandma is going to have to die before the last reel to give the movie another powerhouse scene (as well as a strong link to another plainly obvious inspiration, the “Rocky” series, which made sure to have a tearful deathbed or funeral scene for a mentor figure in nearly every installment). Prince’s presence is also felt through another supporting character, an African-American, antiestablishment, punk-metal solo artist named Basterd (Mamoudou Athie), who lives in a secret hideout in a state park that looks like the musical version of a madman’s laboratory in a horror movie. Basterd speaks in a low, distant voice that suggests immense but highly theatricalized hurt, and his backstory, once revealed, only partly succeeds in making him seem less like a white filmmaker’s fantasy construct of a tortured black musical genius. He’s the most schematic, in many ways ridiculous character in the film. But he’s also the one who is least connected to its shamelessly commercial template, with its familiar visual beats, such as the “training” montages of Patti and the band honing their craft and doing side-by-side power walks while hip-hop blasts on the soundtrack, Patti’s fights with the supervisors who think she should be concentrating on her day job instead of her art, and the moment where Patti looks up from a live performance the means a great deal to her and sees the person she didn’t think would make it standing proudly at the back of the room. (No troubled movie character who shows up at a loved one’s performance is ever on time. They always arrive at the last possible second.)I’m harping on the familiar, formulaic elements of the film not because I’m trying to be mean, but because Jasper, a visually skilled director who’s also a natural with actors, foregrounds them in a way that makes them impossible not to notice and comment on. He’s sampling the older movies he loves just like a hip-hop artist samples the records he loves: the creative person always begins by imitating the art that inspired them, and then, with a bit of gumption and innovation, makes them into something new. “Patti Cake$” doesn’t really succeed at that last part—it always feels a bit too much like a project cooked up in a Sundance lab and precision-tooled for film festival success, and its Mad Libs-like appropriation of underdog movie elements is the least interesting, most irritating thing about it. What elevates it and makes it special are its attention to local geographic and atmosphere, the mundane aspects of working-class Northeastern U.S. life, and the culturally specific types you’ll find in that environment. The movie is generally at its best when it’s showing the intersection of white, black and immigrant youth around hip-hop, including weed culture, street corner freestyle contests, homemade studio jams and the sharing of homemade music. It also captures the way African-American vernacular infiltrates the deepest pockets of everyone else’s speech and art, whether they know it or not; some of the sharpest humor in the movie comes from watching the white characters posture about how another white character isn’t street enough. The movie’s documentary instincts are much sharper than its drama and ultimately much more memorable. Its sense of place and uniformly superb performances make it worth seeing, and maybe ultimately singing along with.
