California Schemin’ review – James McAvoy’s directorial debut is an unlikely rap tale

Toronto film festival: the actor makes for a hit-and-miss first time film-maker with the undeniably involving true story of Scottish rappers who pretended to be American

At the start of the century, a struggling Scottish rap duo decided to overhaul their image in extreme fashion: they began posing as two Americans from California, and managed to secure themselves a record deal with a label in London. Eventually the hoax was revealed, and one of them released a memoir about the charade. That wild story has now been adapted into a film, California Schemin’, which marks the alternately confident and unsteady directorial debut of actor James McAvoy.

McAvoy is a son of Scotland himself, and perhaps feels some kinship with rappers Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, who found the cultural tastemakers of the south to be indifferent or even hostile to Scottish artists. Though McAvoy has fared just fine as an actor, Bain and Boyd – who would come to be known as Silibil N’ Brains – had a much tougher go of it as rappers, an art form that has long been preoccupied with image and street cred. But in the time of Eminem, these two white boys from Dundee figured that they might have a proper shot at stardom if they simply changed accents and invented a little backstory. California Schemin’ is a chronicle of that deception, and a portrait of a tightly bonded friendship straining terribly under the stress of a massive lie.

California Schemin’ is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution