Miracle Mile

    There is a certain understandable horror in the idea of pop stars trying their own brand of on-stage exhibitionism and making it fit into a movie, a format that, by definition, has already maxed-out its show-off charge card.  More often than not these movies are turned into fan club set pieces- an over baked Hail Mary to the Great One who has oh-so generously allowed his or herself to speak through a screenwriter's lines and look through a director's prism.  And while movies like this have provided us with a library of worthy kitsch, they have also been some of the most well known stinkers in the history of film.  After Neil Diamond's abysmal debut in The Jazz Singer, he wouldn't get another role for another twenty years until Saving Silverman came along.  I won't forget Whitney Houston's one-of-the-four-signs-of-the-apocalypse-bad performance in The Bodyguard anytime soon without the help of electro-shock therapy and powerful hallucinogenic drugs. And then last year Mariah Carrey crowned them all with Glitter, a kind of you-wish rags to riches story that only accomplished being favorably compared to Battlefield Earth and wrecking the career of a very promising director.

    So no little hesitation goes into watching a movie like 8 Mile.  Eminem, one of the most popular rappers to emerge from the 1990s, seems to be his own controversy set.  If it isn't the coy debate about whether he broke any kind of racial barrier, it is the argument over his lyrics, or tabloid stories about his tumultuous relationship with his mother.  In the world of CDs, music videos, and on-stage ranting, this may actually be a useful utility, but carrying this much baggage into a movie which boasts itself as being "semi-autobiographical" sounds, at first, like a recipe for disaster.

    But 8 Mile has an army of people behind it to keep it in check.  Producer Brian Grazer won an Academy Award last year for A Beautiful Mind and director Curtis Hanson, who crafted two back-to-back masterpieces with L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys is becoming an artist of skill and reputation approaching that of Spielberg.  And even Eminem knows that he isn't here to market himself.  His performance is restrained, somber.  He seems content to let himself blend in with the dark shadows of the Detroit ghetto that the film calls its home.  The only way 8 Mile can be called a Star is Born clone is through telescopic association.  By the end, we are given no real clue that the main character, Jimmy Smith Jr. (known on the streets as Rabbit), is actually going to amount to anything in the world of hip-hop except for when we believe that this is Eminem's story that we're seeing.

    The character of Rabbit is also painted far more vividly than one would have expected.  When we meet him he has just broken up with his girlfriend who has announced that she is pregnant.  Jimmy, or Rabbit, left her, but gave her his car as the only way he knows to make the situation right.  Later on, he runs into this girlfriend again and she admits that she lied about being pregnant.  They trade insults and then flick each other off, never having learned how to give each other anything else.

    Jimmy moves back with his mom in a trailer along 8 Mile Road (the 8 Mile of the title is the road that separates the Detroit slums from the more affluent suburbs to the north).  His mother, played with an opaque southern accent by Kim Basinger, is unemployed, addicted to bingo, and shaking up with a guy who is so young he was only about a year or so away from being Jimmy's classmate in high school.  She has a tender young daughter named Lillie who Jimmy dotes on.  Some of the most moving moments of the story picture her singing the girl to sleep or smiling at her as he stays up late to make up some rhymes.  Jimmy has a natural talent for hip-hop and we are told, without ever being told, that he sees this as the only way he will ever be able to get his family out of the poverty they live in.

    8 Mile centers around Jimmy's insistence that he won't be stuck in Detroit forever.  In one scene he participates in a "battle," a kind-of poetic slam cage match where those who are out to get some respect try to out-diss each other in rap in forty-five seconds.  Jimmy vomits back stage and when he comes in front of a hostile crowd who wants to know what this white guy is doing here, he freezes.  But Jimmy's friends know how talented he is.  Future (Mekhi Phifer) is the host of the weekly battles who knows that Jimmy will go far.  He tries to warn him off about a sleazy promoter named Wink who works on an alternating system of promises and betrayal (this character is always in movies like this).  When Jimmy finds out that Wink is having sex with the hard boiled girl he's fallen for (Brittany Murphy), he gives Wink a savage beating in the control booth of a local radio station- an act that is going to be paid back on him by other guys Wink has sold promises to.  At this stage of the game, dreams, anger, and jealousy seem to be the only currency worth something.

    8 Mile climaxes with Jimmy squaring off at another battle.  Here, the story swerves a little too close Karate Kid-style rallying but it has undeniable energy.  The outcome never leaves us in suspense, but we were never caught up in what would happen, anyway- just in the spider web of insults and put downs as a proxy for a primal scream spouted out almost by the split-second. 

   The biggest asset of 8 Mile is how it never betrays itself by becoming unduly optimistic.  Too much of the power driving the film would have been lost if things has become self-satisfied and we got to see Jimmy "making it."  This kind of restraint gives due accolades to director Hanson, but Eminem deserves a good share of the credit, as well.  He's enough of a marketable presence that he didn't have to make his debut in a movie as smart and tough as this one.  He could have gone the wrong road of Houston and Carrey and demanded a movie that would paint him as a larger-than-life musical God.  Eminem knows himself, and the character he plays very well, indeed.  He knows that the place Rabbit, or Jimmy, is coming from- he has far too many demons to challenge to worry about becoming a God. A-