Bake a Motherfucking Cake as Fast as You Can

Patti Cake$ a film by Geremy Jasper.  With Danielle Macdonald, Bridgette Everett, Cathy Moriarity, Siddharth Dhanajay, Mamoudou Athie. ****

I should admit up front that I’m not a rap fan.  I’ve tried—my nephew once made me a tape of rap’s greatest hits—but I couldn’t get into it.  I like the rhythm at first, and the whole gestalt, the body movements, stylized gestures.  But it’s a tad repetitive, to say the least.  The lyrics can be inventive and interesting—when I can hear them—but my favorite thing in music is the melody, and there ain’t no melody in rap.

I also don’t like the obviously offensive things, the belligerent tone, glorification of violence, the sexism.  Trading insults can be funny, but not when people mean them, and there’s a scene in the middle of Patti Cake$ where there’s a rap standoff in a parking lot and Patti winds up taking a head butt.  I know it’s a hard cruel world out there, and the rapper’s art just reflects that, but it also seems to promote it.  Maybe if people spoke more nicely they’d treat each other better.  I know I sound like an old fart, but I am an old fart.  I should pretend I like something that seems boring, repetitive, and offensive?

I nevertheless really enjoyed this movie, Patti and all the people around her.  It’s a story that’s been told a million times but Geremy Jasper has written a version for the current moment.  And he hasn’t overdone it.  Patti doesn’t become an international superstar.  She celebrates her greatest triumph with what looks like a late snack from McDonalds.

In a way the movie is about three generations of women, and about the ravages of cigarette smoking, which they don’t seem to have learned.  Patti (Danielle Macdonald), her mother Barb (Bridgette Everett) and her grandmother Nana (Cathy Moriarity) all live together, and to understate the case wildly, housekeepers they’re not.  The opening shot of their apartment is close to vomit-inducing.  They need to learn that it’s okay to empty an ashtray now and then.  Nana seems to have taken decent care of herself except for all the smoking, but Barb and Patti have a tendency toward overweight, and Barb is a boozer (requiring three shots before she can sing karaoke at the sleazy bar where Patti works).  Barb had a near miss at a singing career, but is still in there wailing.  She’s abusive to her daughter and puts down her ambitions, apparently because she sees herself in her.  Patti—despite all these strikes against her—hangs in there.

She has some important allies.  One is Jheri, a very winning Siddharth Dhanajay, who sees Patti’s talent despite her stumbles (she stupidly smokes dope when she has some time in a recording studio, loses confidence and her swag when she gets her first big break, a chance to perform at a titty bar).  Another is a mysterious rapper who is not identified in the cast list but is played by Mamoudou Athie.  He’s a hermit with a dark vision of things, but he too sees Patti’s talent and has a place where they can record.  The fact that Patti has to take care of her Nana doesn’t matter; they make her rasp part of the back-up vocal.  Thus the group PBNJ, and the eponymous song, is born.

Patti Cake$, then, is a movie about accepting your liabilities and limitations and making something of them, actually flaunting them.  Patti—if you’ll pardon the expression—has some balls when it counts, once when she gives herself a chance to perform in front of a famous rapper in his house, another time when she and her buddies get a shot at a talent contest.  Rapping as it’s  portrayed here is an odd mixture of hubris, verbal inventiveness, and thinking on your feet.  Patti, when she’s on her game, has all three.  And there’s something to be said for the sheer sweetness of this movie, the way this band of misfits comes together and supports each other in the face of all kinds of scorn.

I’d love to hear from somebody—all you hip young people out there—about what it is that makes a rapper good: is it the swag, the sheer nerve, the charisma and rapport with the audience?  In every situation she appears in, Patti seems by far the most talented person to me, the most verbally inventive, but people don’t necessarily respond that way.  It turns out that Danielle Macdonald, who gives a superb performance, is actually Australian (like every actor in every movie I see these days), so that she had to learn not only to rap but to talk like a Jersey girl.  It sounded authentic to me.  The real talent here is writer and director Geremy Jasper, who not only took this shopworn story and made it new, but wrote all the rap music in the movie.  He thus become the Ira Gershwin of rap (and we don’t need George, since there’s no melody).

I thought it was a false note, and a sappy moment, where there was a reconciliation of sorts between Patti and Barb at the end.  The woman had been abusive to her daughter for the whole movie; I saw no reason for her to come around.  Otherwise I didn’t hear a false note, so to speak (in a movie where there were no notes, basically).  You got rhythm, Geremy Jasper.  Who could ask for anything more, in a movie about rap?  Maybe a little rhyme.  But you got that too.