It's a scene that dates back at least as far as the street-corner tradition of "playing the dozens," staged as gladitorial combat. On Saturday nights, at an old club, the Shelter, he goes up against the rap leaders of other gangs, all black. Jimmy is the best rapper, and no one in his crew challenges him as leader. Meeting on some ragged street, the men clasp hands and gently touch their right shoulders, leaning forward like stately birds in some preordained ritual. He works in a metal-pressing plant, but his real life is spent with friends-his crew, mainly black, who serve as his supporters, jesters, and stooges. The time is 1995, and Jimmy lives with his blowsy, feckless mother (Kim Basinger) in a trailer park in Detroit, well within 8 Mile Road, the perimeter that divides the inner city from Detroit's affluent white suburbs. He's gone back to his roots, or at least a mythicized version of his roots.Įminem, born Marshall Mathers III, plays Jimmy Smith, Jr., known as Rabbit. He doesn't threaten to "kill" everyone in sight. Eminem lays off the "bitches," too, and mostly gives the "faggots" a rest.
In "8 Mile," Lynne Cheney is not the enemy-at least, not explicitly. It's a relief to see Eminem give up the preening megalomania of his last album, "The Eminem Show," in which he seemed inordinately impressed with the size of his fame-that is, the threat that his success represented to the parents, powers, and principalities of America. They release intolerable feelings of disgust, the fear of remaining a loser forever. Like the fighting in "Rocky" and the dancing in "Saturday Night Fever," the rap songs in "8 Mile" possess a redemptive power. He's very fast, the way Sugar Ray Robinson was fast in the ring. When he breaks out with his stiletto voice in profane lyrics with charged interior rhymes, the rapping has a malign power, and he stays on top of the beat. His trick is to turn self-effacement into a weapon. As a camera subject, Eminem is resistant material-he has the general aspect of a walking hard-on-but he's fascinating, too, and his way of withholding himself is both a natural reflex and a method of teasing and dominating everyone else. You can't see much of him, and what's visible is guarded and hostile-his upper lip has a mean double curl, a natural snarl. His eyelids are partly lowered, his ears are covered with headphones, his body is sheathed in loose-fitting sweats. In Eminem's first movie, "8 Mile," the white rap star is hooded in about five different ways at once: There's a Nike knit cap on his head and, above that, the top of a maroon sweatshirt.
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