Twenty years after its release, the Detroit rap star’s film debut stands as a capstone of the original Eminem moment and an enduring snapshot of white rappers in hip-hop.
About halfway through 8 Mile, Eminem’s character, B-Rabbit, interrupts a casual rap battle happening between his car factory co-workers on their lunch break. Xzibit, playing a guy named Mike, starts to throw jokes ripping on the weight and sexuality of innocent bystanders who are just trying to chill for their 30 minutes, and B-Rabbit steps in to save the day, or at least that’s what he believes.
He opens with “OK, folks, enough with the gay jokes/Especially from a gay broke bitch yourself.” I get it, he’s twisting Mike’s words back at him, and Em’s cartoonishly intense delivery makes you lean on every syllable. Then in true Eminem fashion, he keeps going to the point where it gets uncomfortable. “This guy cashed his whole check and bought one Ho-Ho/Fuckin’ homo’ little maggot, you can’t hack it.” And then he thinks he’s really about to bury him: “Paul’s gay, but you’re a f****t.” It doesn’t end there, but you get the gist. Even if it’s supposed to be semi-fictional, this less than two minutes of rapping crystallizes how a chunk of Eminem’s most impactful music is remembered today. It’s sharp and sometimes funny until the joke is pushed so far that he ends up sounding like the joke instead. If you look up any modern-day Eminem parody—even the ones unintentionally made by himself—they’ll sound a lot like this freestyle.
When used more imaginatively, that ultra-intensity, over-exaggeration, and acidity were part of what made Eminem a magnetic rapper. There’s an insatiable hunger and twisted charisma to his 1999 breakout, The Slim Shady LP, and its 2000 follow-up, The Marshall Mathers LP. But ultimately, the albums are patchy listens, marred by lyrics and drawn-out scenarios so overly edgy that I don’t revisit them these days. And he leaned into his nasty side so thoroughly that when the 8 Mile script, written by Scott Silver and loosely based on Eminem’s life, was brought to Dr. Dre, Em’s Aftermath label boss, Dre apparently said, “What a movie about Eminem needs is six fucked-up scenes.” Thankfully, the filmmakers ignored that advice.
Outside of the lunch break freestyle, 2002’s 8 Mile is Eminem with the rougher edges sanded off. In other cases, that would be a point of criticism, but for Eminem it’s refreshing. Directed by Curtis Hanson, four years after his screenwriting Oscar for L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile is an underdog tale about B-Rabbit climbing up the mid-’90s Detroit battle rap ladder while struggling to get by and find the time to work on his demo. The structure is similar to a sports movie: say, Rocky, or The Bad News Bears. B-Rabbit’s main issues are that he’s broke, a choke artist, and white. They really ham up the struggle of white rappers, treating him like he’s Rudy.
Off camera, Eminem’s status as a white rapper helped him far more than it harmed him. He understood it, too. “Let’s do the math: If I was Black I would’ve sold half,” he raps on the opening track of 2002’s The Eminem Show, released six months before 8 Mile. He was a good rapper, but that wasn’t enough of a reason for MMLP to be the highest selling rap album of all time. Of course, the real reasons were fairly obvious. He was a white rapper who wasn’t a punchline like Vanilla Ice. Or a borderline rap-rock hybrid like the Beastie Boys. And that Dr. Dre co-sign was key, a signal that Eminem was a white guy in the Black world of hip-hop who didn’t seem like he was performing to fit in. To a lot of white people, those factors made him aspirational, or at the very least cool.
That white rapper fascination is ingrained in 8 Mile, too, though it isn’t confronted in any meaningful way. If the movie had been worse, that would have been a bigger issue, but the theater of the battle rap scenes alone make it deserving of its spot in hip-hop flick lore. Inspired by Em and his closest friend Proof’s experiences at the battles that were held every Saturday at the Hip Hop Shop in Detroit, the clashes are ridiculous and lifelike at the same time. Are they actually great battles? Probably not. I’ve never oohed and aahed at most of the punchlines. But the battles do feel alive, from the Mecca, Carhartt, and Champion outfits, to the Black & Milds in the mouths of extras, to the casting of real-life rappers and local battle rap stars as B-Rabbit’s opponents—except the big, bad Papa Doc, played by Anthony Mackie fresh out of Juilliard (you can tell).
Think of all the shitty movies about rappers that hit theaters after this one. Few of them have musically-driven scenes that come close to 8 Mile’s. Notorious and All Eyez On Me stink for a number of reasons, but mostly because the actors are doing Saturday Night Live impersonations of Biggie and 2Pac. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ wants to be 8 Mile but gets lost in the weeds of the crime drama. And this year, there was On the Come Up, a similarly structured teen drama that has solid emotional beats but cringey battle scenes. Straight Outta Compton and Hustle & Flow might actually be better movies than 8 Mile, but actors can’t quite capture the aura of rappers.
From the opening square-off between B-Rabbit and Lil’ Tic, played by Proof, Eminem’s presence jumps off the screen. He’s not even the one doing the rapping here; it’s all Lil’ Tic hitting with a couple of predictable white rapper jabs, but B-Rabbit’s distraught look as he takes the blows is hilarious. As B-Rabbit builds back his confidence, different elements of what made Eminem an undeniable rapper surface through the character: his dark sense of humor, or the way he smoothly bounced off a group of other MCs. I particularly like when B-Rabbit and his best friend Future (Mekhi Phifer rocking a horrifying dread wig) are freestyling over “Sweet Home Alabama.” It’s one of the few times B-Rabbit isn’t moping, and it captures an animated side of Eminem’s flow without veering toward the all-out hokiness of the caricatures on 2004’s Encore. Future is based on Proof—they initially wanted Proof to play him, but he didn’t show up to the audition—and this moment reminds me a lot of Em and Proof’s timeless MTV car freestyle.
The final tournament is everything to 8 Mile, ten minutes as electrifying as the final showdown in Bloodsport or the father-son face-off in He Got Game. Again, the bars are very OK, but Eminem’s charisma and the crowd going nuts sell them. Especially in the finals, when B-Rabbit strips away all Papa Doc’s ammo through self-deprecation, and reveals that his opponent’s real name is Clarence. The crowd is shocked by this as if they really believed his government name was Papa Doc. But B-Rabbit says it so forcefully—and with Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones” instrumental in the background—that it feels just as momentous as it’s supposed to be.
After a couple of buttons on the story, the credits roll, and the completed version of B-Rabbit’s demo plays, and it’s “Lose Yourself.” The song is the highlight of an underwhelming soundtrack with mostly B-tier leftovers from rap stars like Nas, JAY-Z, and Rakim. “Lose Yourself” is probably the most widely known Eminem song, which is strange because it’s so straight. It’s good, though. The opening guitar build-up is tense, and those strained first few lines (“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy/There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti”) are as colorful and dramatic as anything he’s ever written. He always rapped with a chip on his shoulder, and “Lose Yourself” makes you buy into that, though given his massive success, it’s probably the last time that approach could work.
“Lose Yourself” won Eminem an Oscar for Best Original Song, was his first Billboard No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100, and cemented him as one of the pop stars of the era. By the time his 2004 album Encore came around, he was still incredibly popular, but out of touch. When he wasn’t doing goofy impersonations, he was still acting as if the world was against him, which made him sound like a rich troll rather than the pop culture disruptor he thought he was. He still sounds a lot like that today; over the years, his music has become less complex and more one-note. In the meantime, his legacy is split. In one corner of music fandom, it’s immovable. In another, it’s constantly being reinterpreted and redefined. Whatever side you land on, 8 Mile stands not just as a capstone of the original Eminem moment but as a snapshot of how nuanced his rapping once was.
