Noticeably, Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile does not have a traditional score. Instead, as we realize around the time our protagonist’s aspiring rap career comes into focus, the entirety of the music, made up of the percussive flow of rap beats, exists within the mind of Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith. Indeed, at one point, phrases of lyrics trickle into the soundtrack as the film plays on and whenever Jimmy finds the time (usually during his bus ride to work) to scribble notes onto a notebook. Those seeing the film at the time of its release in November 2002 might not have known, but hindsight reveals to us that those lyrical phrases belong to the three verses and chorus of “Lose Yourself,” the original song co-written and performed by the film’s star, Eminem.
The movie was released during the Detroit rap musician’s peak in terms of both fame and creativity, having come out just less than six months following The Eminem Show and two-and-a-half years after The Marshall Mathers LP (the two albums still widely considered his best). Despite the enormous amount of infamy and controversy, especially within suburban households that thought him partially responsible for a so-called “antisocial wave” at the turn of the century and at least one highly publicized school shooting, this was still early into the story of Eminem, which would only grow even more dramatic in the years ahead. Watching it now, 8 Mile feels even more like a first act than it likely did then – effective and affecting though the film certainly is.
Eminem plays Jimmy as something of an extension upon himself, rather than simply a version of himself. Jimmy is, importantly, a fictional creation, but as so many details of his drudgery-filled life fit into a broader picture of what we know about the man playing him, he feels real, too. His home life is a mess, living with his deadbeat mother Stephanie (Kim Basinger), her abusive new boyfriend Greg (Michael Shannon) and Lily (Chloe Greenfield), his own daughter through a previous relationship (Taryn Manning plays Janeane, the girl’s mother, who is clearly based on Eminem’s ex-wife Kim Mathers) in a rundown trailer park where everyone may soon be evicted. Stephanie wastes her money on booze and bad decisions, ignores Jimmy and Lily to their disadvantage, and seems unable or unwilling to escape the sociopathic wrath of Greg – who, by the way, is young enough to have gone to high school with Jimmy and his friends.
His work situation is a little better, but only just, being a stultifying factory job under the watchful eye of an upper management that seems barely to tolerate his home and car troubles, whether he has to ride the bus to work or walk the whole way when he is already running late. The only positive thing going for Jimmy is his tightknit posse – Cheddar Bob (Evan Jones), Sol George (Omar Benson Miller), introspective poet DJ Iz (De’Angelo Wilson), Wink (Eugene Byrd) and Jimmy’s best childhood friend Future (Mekhi Phifer), who helps to put his name out there via underground rap battles. The film opens with one such battle, in which Jimmy is unable to conjure any lines to combat the stream of insults from the other participant, drops his microphone and leaves in shame.
This is a smart decision on the parts of Hanson and screenwriter Scott Silver, as it forces the audience to consider the character of Jimmy Smith Jr. as a man humbled by his circumstances – preternaturally blessed with abilities, but somehow unable to channel them in a way that follows through on his potential. Only when things begin to look up a little bit, in the form of a romance with the mercurial and disarming Alex (Brittany Murphy) and a few scrapes with a gang of rival underground rap stars (led by Anthony Mackie’s Papa Doc), do the words return to Jimmy. This translates to a series of sequences, climaxing with the Big Rap Battle, in which both Jimmy’s and Eminem’s skills on the mic are made most apparent.
The rhymes here are the equal of those penned and performed by the man himself – pointed, profane and honest, especially in how they cut away all the nonsense to get at the core of something that their performer observes about himself, about others, and about the world around him. This, beyond all the hoopla surrounding the specific language he uses (rhetoric he learned on streets populated by those only trying to survive, after all), has been the pull of Eminem’s discography across his three-decade career. Here, though, we see an Eminem (and Jimmy) in progress, still operating those gears in his brain, as he lives and learns from both pain and glory.
The performances from the film’s supporting cast are strong across the board, from Basinger’s pathetic portrait of a woman as pitiful as she is sad and lost, to Murphy, whose resilient Alex only makes us the sting of the actress’s 2009 death even more painful. The surrounding story becomes predictable, of course, as the rivalries and the romance and Jimmy’s rickety relationship with his family all come to a boiling point of resentment and rage. We know what must happen, but we only really know it because of our awareness of Eminem’s life until 2002. It means that 8 Mile rises above its familiarity to help us recognize its truth.
The post Holy Hell! 8 Mile Turns 20 appeared first on Spectrum Culture.