Music, specifically hip-hop, is Geremy Jasper’s first love. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone watching Patti Cake$, which marks his assured filmmaking debut.
In fact, Jasper’s underdog story — about a young New Jersey native pursuing dreams of stardom while finding some unlikely collaborators — has close autobiographical ties.
“I was 23 and living in my parents’ basement in New Jersey, dreaming of getting out and being a musician somehow — finding a gang of people to make music with,” Jasper said by phone. “I was working dead-end jobs and coming home at night and just writing stuff for myself.”
It took a few years until Jasper connected with some people who shared his vision. Then he formed a band and went on tour for about five years before becoming burned out, so he shifted his energy to directing, first for music videos and then film. But while his first feature includes elements of his own life story, Jasper couldn’t shake the character of Patti from his mind.
“I didn’t want to write a movie about myself. It would be really boring. Patti seemed like the women who I grew up with. It was much more interesting for me,” he said. “Hip-hop is such a masculine art form, that she brought something unique. I just started with that character and took it from there.”
Patti (Danielle Macdonald) is an overweight 23-year-old woman still living with her disapproving former nightclub-singing single mother (Bridget Everett) in their fledgling blue-collar town.
While enduring nicknames such as “Dumbo” and “White Precious,” she takes out her insecurities and self-esteem issues on a different kind of music — her vicious rhymes that she shares only in impromptu rap battles and with her optimistic friend, Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay), between bartending gigs.
Caught between her dream of breaking free from her downtrodden environment and resigning herself to living within it, Patti forms a makeshift band with her small group of friends and fellow social outcasts who exemplify the cultural melting pot in their setting.
Besides Hareesh, there’s a painfully shy outsider (Mamoudou Athie) with a secret stash of recording equipment, and even Patti’s depressed grandmother (Cathy Moriarty), who contributes some unlikely background vocals for a demo track the group hopes will find the right ears.
Jasper’s screenplay earned him a coveted slot in the Sundance Institute Lab Program in Utah, which has nurtured many successful independent films over the past two decades. That’s when Jasper met Macdonald, who came recommended by one of his producers.
Even before Macdonald helped Jasper workshop scenes for three weeks in 2014, the director knew he found his star.
“Patti has a very specific build and attitude. She [Macdonald] looked exactly how I had imagined the character,” Jasper said. “She looks like a movie star to me, but she feels like the girl next door. She has so much range as an actress.”
However, Macdonald was from Australia, which is about 10,000 miles from Lodi, New Jersey. And she rarely listened to hip-hop, let alone performed it. So over the next several months, she worked with a dialect coach to perfect Patti’s distinct accent and learned how to rap by listening to classic tracks and emulating them during studio sessions.
By the time the cameras rolled — almost two years after those Sundance workshops — Macdonald had transformed into Patti.
“She put so much work into this character,” Jasper said. “We spent hours and hours, and thousands of takes, finding Patti’s voice and finding her flow and making Danielle feel as comfortable as possible in the role.”
Everett, who started her career as a struggling comedian and cabaret singer before experiencing a recent breakthrough in her mid-40s, connected with Patti’s quest to shatter stereotypes.
“In my 20s and 30s, there were a lot of karaoke bars and a lot of feeling sorry for myself. There was a lot of anger that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I relate to that a lot,” Everett said. “I’m not built like a pop star or a Broadway actor. I just started creating my own thing out of necessity. Patti is doing the same thing. She’s creating her own persona and her own destiny.”
