Sundance might want to watch out or they’re liable to get a reputation. After Patti Cake$ spit fire all over the screen last year, the festival hosts Joseph Kahn’s fierce battle rap comedy, Bodied, featuring another white boy rapper with the sick rhyme flow. Given that Eminem is on board as a producer, the rags to rap superiority tale should come as no surprise, nor should the film’s antagnoistic take on racial dynamics in the hip hop world.
The battle raps are the constant highlight, with Kahn’s energetic camera whirling around the battlefield, weaving in and out of the hyped onlookers. A particularly devastating insult might be super imposed with powerful comic book letters, or emboldened with the visual rat-a-tat-tat of verbal gunfire. If the film is overlong at two hours, the matches themselves never grow old, and I found myself forgetting that they were fictional and not taped footages of actual fights.
But Kahn isn’t interested in just the act of it; he recognizes that there is an art to battling. While Adam’s whiteness is always his Achilles heel, race, gender, physical appearance, religion, they are all fair game and the trick is to tear down your opponent with style. Does saying the word nigga in a rap battle make it okay? Does saying such vile things to defeat your opponent make you a terrible person? The script is a little all over the map when trying to decide. Adam goes through a stretch where his take-no-prisoners lyrics, a combination of vicious word play and liberal politics, causes him to lose everything he holds dear. At some points it’s tough to tell if he’s the hero of this story or the goat, and I don’t mean G.O.A.T. like LL Cool J.
Bodied is sure to offend just about everybody with its politically incorrect takes, but it holds particular venom for privileged white liberals who don’t recognize their biases. To win, Adam has to embrace that part of himself, while someone like Maya says what sounds right without recognizing the content of her words. And that may be the ultimate answer to the question that dogs Adam. The vile, nasty words he destroys opponents with don’t matter as much as who he is as a man. It’s only when the verbal assaults get personal that a clash has gone too far.
Debuting to a raucous reception at lat year’s TIFF, Bodied was just picked up by YouTube and screened here at Sundance for a select group. I’m not sure the progressive white crowd in Park City was the right audience, but I’m more curious to see how it’s received to a wider audience. Bodied can definitely get the crowd pumped like the world’s best hype man, but it’ll be interesting to see if it offends so many that nobody is left in the crowd to be moved.
