Slim's shady past

Eminem is the most successful white rap star to have emerged from the hybrid phenomenon that previously spawned Vanilla Ice and The Beastie Boys. He has played the black rap gangstas at their own game and, it seems, has won. No wonder he has been adopted as an iconic hero of the American Right.

To all intents and purposes, Eminem's debut movie, 8 Mile, is his own story, beefed-up with a little fictional drama. Set in his home town of Detroit in 1995, it depicts the dark side of the city, which resembles Beirut on a bad day.

With its crumbling buildings, befouled alleys and rusting cars abandoned where they stalled, Detroit is a post-industrial wasteland, a pocket of America's internal Third World. It is peopled by black gangs and white trailer trash who live in parks beyond the eightmile limit of the title.

Having split up with his newlypregnant girlfriend, Jimmy Smith Jr (Eminem) is forced to return to the trailer he calls home, where his alcoholic mother and little sister are living with a guy barely older than himself. It's not an ideal situation, especially when Jimmy enters without knocking to find his mother naked astride his former school colleague.

Jimmy is down but not out. He gets a job in a panel-pressing plant after his dreams of becoming a successful white rapper are curdled when he freezes at the mike during one of the Saturday-night hip-hop "battles" at a local club. Jeered off stage ("You don't belong here/You're a tourist").

Jimmy vows never to humiliate himself again and decides to make enough money to make a demo and break through on his own. But his friends have other ideas, and start pulling him in two directions: Future (Mekhi Phifer), a hip-hop impresario, wants him to keep trying at the underground club, while the optimistic Sol (Omar Benson Miller) thinks he can get a recording-deal and take Jimmy mainstream. Director Curtis Hanson washes the movie in a palette of greys, greens and browns, the colours of decay and rust.

The beautiful buildings of old Detroit, including the Michigan Theatre and the reconstructed Chin Tiki restaurant, are lovingly observed on screen to the point where the city becomes a character itself.

The performances are generally of a high standard (though Kim Basinger can't help being too beautiful as Jimmy's mother) and Eminem has considerable screen presence. The moments of tenderness in-between the bullyboy attitude-suggest that he might have a future in movies in the manner of Mark Wahlberg.

The real problem here is the dogeared plot, which could have been transplanted from Flashdance, Rocky or Saturday Night Fever without undue effort by the screenwriters. It is, in a word, pedestrian.

There are also glaring inconsistencies: Jimmy is depicted as a tough rapper whose lyrics are brutal, misogynous, homophobic and downright scatalogical and he has abandoned his pregnant girlfriend because he needs to seek his destiny, yet at home he is a substitute father for his young sister (making up rhymes for her like any loving daddy) and a substitute husband to his mother whom he admonishes to stop whining and seek employment. The film's signals, especially over attitudes to homosexuality, are confused to say the least. Maybe it's a Rap Thing.