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At the start of the century, a struggling Scottish rap duo decided to overhaul their image in extreme fashion: they began posing as two Americans from California, and managed to secure themselves a record deal with a label in London. Eventually the hoax was revealed, and one of them released a memoir about the charade. That wild story has now been adapted into a film, California Schemin’, which marks the alternately confident and unsteady directorial debut of actor James McAvoy.
McAvoy is a son of Scotland himself, and perhaps feels some kinship with rappers Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, who found the cultural tastemakers of the south to be indifferent or even hostile to Scottish artists. Though McAvoy has fared just fine as an actor, Bain and Boyd – who would come to be known as Silibil N’ Brains – had a much tougher go of it as rappers, an art form that has long been preoccupied with image and street cred. But in the time of Eminem, these two white boys from Dundee figured that they might have a proper shot at stardom if they simply changed accents and invented a little backstory. California Schemin’ is a chronicle of that deception, and a portrait of a tightly bonded friendship straining terribly under the stress of a massive lie.
Séamus McLean Ross plays Gavin, the more passionate and desperate of the two. He works with Billy (Samuel Bottomley) in a dead-end job at a call center, dreaming of fame and riches while Billy flirts with his girlfriend, Mary (Lucy Halliday). The threesome are warm and encouraging with one another, outsiders pitted against the world and happily rushing at it nonetheless. But Gavin is disillusioned after being bluntly rejected by record label execs at an open talent showcase, a disastrous trip to London that hardens both boys’ determination that English bigotry against Scottish people will forever hamper their chances.
There’s a giddy thrill, then, in the beginning of their con, the endgame of which is to expose the prejudices of the music-industry elite. The trouble is – or, the miracle is – they’re actually really good at what they do, spunky and rude and lyrically nimble. Soon they are whisked off on a runaway train star-is-born journey that distracts them from their mission. McAvoy, working with a script by Elaine Gracie and Archie Thompson, keeps things fast and antic to synthesize this heady whirlwind, while letting the darkness of a reckoning creep in from the edges.
California Schemin’ is awfully predictable in its plotting, tracing the line of rise and fall and redemption so endemic to the music biopic genre. The distinct oddness of the story at least holds our attention, all the excitement of a con game deftly pulled off, and, of course, the stress of its inevitable unraveling. As Gavin falls ever deeper into the fantasy, Mary tries to drag Billy back to reality. A bit of violence eventually enters the picture, jarringly disrupting what began as a brothers-in-art-and-fabulism adventure.
While McAvoy stages some rousing concert sequences and ably conjures the rush of sudden success, he might have slowed the film down on occasion in order to capture more texture and detail. He also might have given Ross more sturdy direction; the performance is high energy but blurry, Gavin yawing between overeager kid and budding sociopath. It’s hard to parse his temperament: at times he is shy and retreating, at others selfish and rash. Plenty of young men contain those same multitudes, but the character here is frustratingly difficult to read.
Still, we do feel for Gavin as he basks in overnight glory and then watches in dejected horror as the dream slips away just as quickly. There is still a decency in him, after all, particularly evident in his concern for Tessa (Rebekah Murrell), a record company employee who risks her career on Silibil N’ Brains and stands to lose just as much as them when the trickery is exposed. California Schemin’ is, in the end, a kindhearted film about integrity, about art for art’s sake, about embracing one’s roots. Here in nepotism’s heyday, when a regular person’s path to creative success grows ever narrower, it’s hard not to sympathize with Gavin and Billy’s grand hustle. They may be pretenders, but they are undeniably talented ones.
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California Schemin’ is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution
