Butler's Cinema Scene

Danielle MacDonald, Siddharth Dahanajay

“PATTI CAKE$” My rating: B+ 

108 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Think of “Patti Cake$” as a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney teen musical for the new millennia.

As with those old M-G-M productions, the premise is hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show. But the details have changed.  Now the setting is America’s urban wasteland, the “show” is rap, and the language is, well, salty.

“My life is fucking awesome” announces Patricia Dumbrowski (Danielle MacDonald), a 250-pounder  who tends bar and is known around her backwater New Jersey neighborhood as “Dumbo.”

“I’m 23 and I ain’t done shit.”

About all Patricia has going for her is a way with words, spunk, and this vague idea that given half a chance she could be one of the great rappers.

Turns out that’s enough.  This is a movie, after all — probably the crowd-pleasingest movie of the fall.

“Patti Cake$” — that’s Patricia’s rapper moniker — is a winning combination of rude/lewd grit and warm good feelings. Over the course of Geremy Jasper’s feature debut audiences will fall in love not only with Patti but with her weird and weirdly innocent collaborators.

Like the Pakistani-American Jerhi (Siddhartha Dahanajay),  during the day a lab-coated pharmacist’s assistant but at night a high-energy parody of a rapper.  Or Bastard Antichrist (Mamoudzou Athie), a dreadlocked freak with one blue eye, a covert recording studio in a hovel in the woods, and an electric guitar that can etch glass.

Patti Cake$ and her musical collaborators

Patti Cake$’ will need her friends, because life at home is pretty sketchy. Her mother, Barbara (Bridget Everett),  is a bleached blonde floozy who peaked some years back. She once had a shot at rock stardom and still hits the bars to sing and cadge drinks from the easily impressed. Barbara relies on Patti to earn enough money to keep the eviction notices at bay.

Then there’s Patti’s cranky grandmother, Nana (a scene-stealing Cathy Moriarty, virtually unrecognizable), who  is slowly dying in front of the TV set, a bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  When she speaks  it comes out in a Phyllis Diller cackle. For Nana being part of a struggling rap band seems like the perfect way to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Bridget Everett

Jasper’s script follows our heroine as she struggles with a series of dead-end jobs, devoting her spare time to street-corner rap shootouts, all the while working her way up to the showcase performance that could be her shot at the big time.

“Patti  Cake$” is often uproariously funny, but it’s also imbued with hope and a genuine affection for the underdog.

And it has been ridiculously well acted.

Macdonald, an Australian actress, is terrific as Patti, revealing the big soul within the big body. And her rapping is terrific.

She’s equally matched by Everett as her maddeningly self-centered mother (a 40-year-old who still acts and thinks like an 18-year-old) and especially Moriarty’s wheelchair-bound grannie.

| Robert W. Butler