Eminem: Ghetto superstar

His was always an unlikely success story - the aggressive white rapper with a chip on his shoulder and serious family issues. But a powerful new movie has forced America to reconsider its opinion of Eminem. Now he's even being used to promote Western values in the Middle East. Andrew Gumbel reports on the latest chapter in an extraordinary story

We've come to expect a lot of things of Marshall Mathers III, the controversial rapper and pop culture phenomenon better known to the world as Eminem, but documentary realism hasn't, so far, been one of them. And yet, that's what we largely get in 8 Mile, his startlingly effective big-screen debut that – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the track record of every commercial venture he touches – shot to the top of the American box-office charts as soon as it was released last weekend.

Eminem plays a lightly fictionalised version of himself growing up in the blighted inner suburbs of Detroit – the eponymous 8-Mile Road being the dividing line between the black ghetto of Detroit proper and the impoverished front line of white, suburban Oakland County. In one of the early scenes, Eminem's character Jimmy Smith Jr, also known as Rabbit, finds himself freezing on a street corner with nowhere to turn. He has broken up with his girlfriend, forcing him to move back temporarily into the miserable trailer home rented by his chronically unreliable mother (an utterly deglamorised Kim Basinger).

She, in turn, expects him to be out of the trailer whenever she entertains her latest boyfriend, a contemporary of his from high school. She has given Rabbit a car because she says that she loves him, but now he needs to get to work and the engine refuses to turn over – some birthday present.

Jimmy commiserates with his friend Future (Mekhi Phifer), a budding rap entrepreneur who wants to nurture his talent even though white boys like him have to struggle to be taken seriously in the black-dominated scene. In the background, someone's radio is playing the old Lynyrd Skynyrd number, "Sweet Home Alabama". At first, Jimmy and Future hum along. Then they play around with the words and turn it into a witty commentary on Jimmy's straitened circumstances – a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the white-trash lifestyle. Finally, Jimmy tentatively expands the theme in a series of rap riffs, all the while keeping to the pulsing underlying beat.

The scene is played for laughs, but it is also a wonderful encapsulation of why rap exists and the irresistible appeal that the form holds for so many people. As captured in Rodrigo Prieto's stark photography, the shards of Detroit's calamitously dilapidated urban landscape surround Jimmy on all sides. His family – with the notable exception of his relationship to his kid sister – is a disaster, its emotional language reduced to strings of expletives and frequent fist-fights. There isn't a single person in the film who isn't trying to reinvent themselves, rename themselves, or get out of town to find a better life.

Rap, in these circumstances, is a form of empowerment, the promise of a future in a city that otherwise has none. It is also a way of creating a means of self-expression, even art, out of hopelessness. The transformation of "Sweet Home Alabama", throwaway though it is, can almost be read as a potted history of the evolution of popular urban music; a reminder that Detroit itself has travelled far, from its own days of R&B during the Motown era to the altogether more arresting ascension of such acts as Insane Clown Posse, Kid Rock, and Eminem himself.

That 8 Mile is such a compelling piece of social observation is no doubt thanks in large part to the director, Curtis Hanson, an old pro at the movie-making game (he was responsible, among others, for LA Confidential and Wonder Boys) who admitted knowing next to nothing about rap at the outset, and who brought entirely fresh eyes to the project. He manages to imbue a fairly standard showbiz storyline about a poor boy seeking his fortune, with all sorts of intricacies about race, class and the sheer verbal pyrotechnics involved in fighting and winning a rap "battle" – the subject of 8 Mile's climactic final scene.

One has to wonder, though, what exactly Eminem is doing in a project like this. After all, it wasn't so long ago that he was everyone's favourite whipping boy, the foul-mouthed scourge of American youth, a performer so shocking – and so shamelessly thrilled to be the centre of so much controversy – that the US Congress tried to concoct a law to keep him out of teenage bedrooms forever. Anyone trying to imagine an Eminem biopic around the time of his attention-grabbing Marshall Mathers LP two years ago might have found themselves trembling at the thought of seeing his ex-wife Kim being sliced and diced on camera, or his mother having her head slammed through a meat-grinder so she would wind up dead, as he says in his songs.

So what happened? Why is he suddenly giving the masses the lowdown on the rationale behind his art? How come he has become so thoughtful? Isn't it more his style to flip us the bird, show us the finger, threaten to dismember us limb by limb, and then laugh hilariously at our inclination to take him seriously?

The truth is, a lot of things have happened since Eminem was living the life of his on-screen alter ego and cultivating his first audiences at rap battles in converted homeless shelters. The biggest thing, naturally, has been record sales: 30 million units shifted to date, with several million more likely to fly out of the stores imminently, to judge by the early running on the 8 Mile soundtrack, featuring his latest single "Lose Yourself". Whether Eminem likes it or not (and, despite his protestations to the contrary on songs like "The Way I Am", he probably doesn't dislike it all that much), he has become more than a cultural phenomenon. He has become a major commercial enterprise, a brand, a franchise. Sheer popularity has blown any claims to marginal status right out of the water, and with that has come an inevitable adjustment of focus and direction. People outside his core teenage audience have stopped trying to rail against him, and started trying to understand him. All of a sudden, people in their forties and fifties are turning up to his concerts, scarcely turning a hair as he delivers his expletive-laced invectives against government hypocrites, drug-addled parents, and a society that is irredeemably dysfunctional, from the way it embraces gun culture to its adulation of Britney Spears. In packed showings of 8 Mile in Los Angeles over the past few days, some of the audience members have been as old as 70; one grey-haired lady told the Los Angeles Times that she thought that Eminem was a doll.

It is hard to be too controversial when you are also so adored. But the controversy has been dying for other reasons, too. When Elton John, one of the few avowedly gay performers in pop, stepped forward to perform with Eminem at the Grammys last year, it gave the lie to the notion that there was anything straightforwardly vile about his "faggot"-heavy lyrics – and immediately deflated the throngs of gay and feminist protesters who had flocked to the event to denounce him as a hatemonger.

Six months later, the September 11 attacks definitively got the Federal Trade Commission, the Democratic presidential contender Joe Lieberman, and the rest of the government moralisers off his back. As Jimmy Iovine, the owner of Eminem's Interscope record label, memorably put it in a recent interview: "Bin Laden stopped that... 9/11 showed that Joe Lieberman should have been managing the FBI and the CIA instead of trying to manage my company." Now, the US government is actually broadcasting Eminem as part of its propaganda effort to sell American youth culture to the Arab world. (One can only imagine the reaction in Amman or Beirut as he tells Lynne Cheney, the wife of the vice-president, to go screw herself.)

Eminem's superstar status has had an uneven effect on his work. The Eminem Show, the much-anticipated follow-up to The Marshall Mathers LP, didn't earn nearly the critical enthusiasm of its predecessor, and one can see why. Although it deals in much the same subject matter – his Slim Shady alter ego, his public image, his ever-hateful mum – it doesn't carry nearly the same bite. With the exception of the opening track, "White America", with its extraordinary invective against middle-class suburbia, and its exhortation to go urinate on the lawns of the White House, the foul language and the violent imagery seem a little repetitive and forced – as though Eminem were giving his audience what they want rather than shocking them with something genuinely new. Where he does depart from his previous work, it is in the worst possible direction – singing saccharine inanities about his adorable daughter in the style of one of the teen boy bands he supposedly abhors. Granted, Eminem probably has personal reasons to clean up his act and shed the incipient gangster image that got him arrested on gun charges twice a couple of years ago. As an artist, though, he was undeniably more interesting when he carried about him the whiff of real danger.

The film is an altogether more welcome development, not least because of the window it opens up on the whole rap scene and the social vibrancy of the hip-hop ethic. For years, it has been a little too easy for anyone outside rap's obvious target audience to dismiss it as a grand exercise in commercial bad faith, in which an unpleasantly swaggering form of aggressive machismo gets sold to suburban white kids so that they can make themselves think that they have acquired a certain black inner-city cool. What 8 Mile does is to return rap to its roots, depicting it as a direct response to social breakdown and cultural dysfunction. The movie leaves aside the undeniable cynicism and corruption of the music business (mainly because none of the characters gets as far as signing a contract) to show that rap is above all a painful, often unflattering portrayal of American society as seen from the ground up.

It is quite likely that 8 Mile will be the first experience a mass audience has of this world. The film's "battle" scenes, in particular, show how the language of rap, with all its aggression and self-aggrandisement, grows out of a very specific context of furious competition, flashy wordplay and spontaneous, acerbic wit. Eminem's character throws out insults to ward off others that might otherwise be thrown at him; he pre-empts criticism by making fun of himself and, gradually, he asserts his on-stage personality by being even more outrageous than the next guy. Do rappers like Eminem really hate gays and women? You can't entirely think so after seeing the film; their motivation, which admittedly grows out of a specific cultural context, is more about shouting the loudest and making the biggest impact – a skill even Eminem's fiercest detractors wouldn't deny him.

Perhaps inevitably, the film does sanitise Eminem to a certain degree. Granted, this is not straight biography, but several elements of the plot serve the purposes of polishing or idealising the real-life Marshall Mathers. We see the fictional Jimmy being almost heroically loving towards his little sister (shades of Eminem and his daughter Hailie?). For all his hotheadedness, he does protect his mother at one point from her increasingly abusive boyfriend (since when did Slim Shady cut Debbie Mathers such a break?). In one scene, set at the metal-stamping factory where he works, Jimmy weighs in on behalf of a workmate who is ridiculed for being gay (casting off all those accusations of homophobia?).

Jimmy is also a virtual poster-child for racial integration and harmony, hanging out with black and white friends alike and – aside from the inevitable jibes comparing him to Elvis or Vanilla Ice – never being forced to engage seriously with his whiteness in a predominantly black field. The film argues vigorously that race is far less important in a place like Detroit than class, that what counts in a rapper is not skin colour but where he grew up and the culture he absorbed on the way. It's a view that undeniably favours Eminem – especially now that he needs to hold on to his street cred and fend off criticism that he is just another white guy who has made it to the top – and it has raised a few objections among 8 Mile's otherwise enthusiastic critics. "The city is a product of race politics, a place where whites bailed out after riots in 1967 and left a black power structure without resources to maintain a city," the Detroit writer RJ Smith objected in The Village Voice. "It's starting to shake off decades of entropy, but colour-blind it isn't and shouldn't be." Eminem himself might be embarrassed by the film's racial idealism, too. After all, he admits on his latest album: "Look at my sales, let's do the math/ If I was black I would've sold half."

Not that we can expect any revolutionary talk on race – or any other topic – in the near future. Although he undoubtedly has the rage and the large, disaffected audience that could potentially make the beginnings of a revolution, Eminem is too much of a showman, too wrapped up in his stage persona, to push an overtly political agenda. In one sense, that's a pity, because rap is in so many ways the expression of politically disenfranchised voices. But it is also inevitable, especially with an act that has become as uncontrollably huge as his.

He's busy expanding his horizons, moving into mixed media, releasing DVDs of his albums, and establishing artists on his Slim Shady label. Whatever the merits of 8 Mile, film acting is, ultimately, just one more departure for him, and documentary realism another way of developing his image. By now, Eminem has been subsumed into the culture of entertainment consumerism as surely as Harry Potter or Spider-Man. Expect to hear plenty more about him in future; just don't expect him to be as edgy or provocative again.

'8 Mile' is being shown at the London Film Festival on Fri and Sat (020-7928 3232), and is on general release from 17 January