Review: In 'Patti Cake$,' hip-hop dreams in New Jersey
The Sundance sensation "Patti Cake$" may flow with formulaic beats but it's got spirit for miles (eight of them, at least) and features one of the best mother-daughter relationships of the year.
Later, her best friend and optimistic music partner Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay) will, from behind his pharmacy counter, announce her arrival on the store PA system, as she strolls down the toothpaste aisle, with the kind of grandiose pomp traditionally reserved for James Brown.
The distance between dream and reality has long been measured — and usually shrunk — by the movies, though the gap has rarely been so extreme as in "Patti Cake$."
When Patti arrives at her bartending job — the only employment keeping her and her hard-drinking mom (Bridget Everett) just out of their creditors' reach — her boss tells her, "Toilet's still clogged and the karaoke isn't going to set itself up."
By piling on the eccentricity (the anarchist lives in a shack in the woods near a cemetery) and, later, the predictably manipulative moments (someone will die at just the right juncture), writer-director Geremy Jasper — a music-video veteran making his directorial debut — shows himself a good study of a well-trod genre: the Sundance-style indie underdog tale.
[...] the kind of music Patti makes hardly matters.
Patti Cake$," a Fox Searchlight release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "language throughout, crude sexual references, some drug use and a brief nude image.