California Schemin review – a predictable and soft-edged music biog

This is an amazing example of afamous actor making his directorial debut but then completely stealing the film from under the feet of its two young leads. James McAvoy’s presence as abloodcurdling record label boss injects asense of hair-trigger violence into this otherwise featherlight tale of two aspirant Scottish rappers who decide to feign American accents as away to fast-track their success. This is adramatised version of Jeanie Finlay’s 2013 doc, The Great Hip Hop Hoax, focusing on two lovable bozos, Billy Boyd (Samuel Bottomley) and Gavin Bain (Séamus McLean Ross), aka Silibil N’ Brains, as they ride asudden wave of minor success with aview to eventually holding amirror up to the cultural xenophobia endemic within the music industry.

From scraping aliving as call-centre stooges to sharing astage with the Eminem-affiliated D12, they experience astratospheric rise that always teeters on the edge of unlikeliness, and McAvoy too often rests on the fact that because it’s based on true events, he doesn’t need to strain to make things feel authentic. Bottomley and Ross are appealing leads, with the latter in particular making aconvincing transition from puppyish introvert to fame-fixated monster. And there’s an interesting metaphor here for McAvoy’s own career as aScottish man who earns acrust by perfecting arange of accents and character types. Yet its feelgood arc is all alittle predictable and soft-edged.