Conner O’Malley’s Mockumentary ‘Rap World’ Is the Anti-‘8 Mile’
The comedy of errors follows a bunch of suburban dipshits as they try and fail (and fail and fail) to make a classic rap album.
Rap World already feels like a cult classic. For the past couple of weeks, this mockumentary about a group of delusional jackasses recording a rap album in the late 2000s has been popping up everywhere I look: on Twitter threads, friends’ Letterboxd profiles, you name it. Then I came across a photo of the film’s co-director, co-writer, and star, perpetually unhinged comedian Conner O’Malley, in character as a hot-headed loser, at the top of a Vulture interview. In the shot, he’s rocking a black nylon hoodie with camo sleeves, hands outstretched with a Mike and Ike in each palm, like a white, himbo Morpheus. Wow, I thought when I first saw it, If this were a real person, he definitely would’ve completely missed the point of The Matrix and also would’ve been really into Wiz Khalifa and old Eminem and Jedi Mind Tricks albums. When I finally pressed play on Rap World, which is streaming for free on O’Malley’s YouTube channel, I didn’t realize how right I would be.
The story, if you can call it that, is stretched across one long night in the sleepy Pennsylvania suburb of Tobyhanna. It’s January 2009, the very start of the Obama era, and Matt (O’Malley) and Casey (comedian Jack Bensinger) are two low-level movie theater employees hellbent on creating the rap album of the century with their producer friend Jason (Eric Rahill). The plan? While Casey’s mom is out of town getting surgery to make “her ears more separated from her head,” they use the house to lay down vocals and have their friend Ben tape them kicking it like they’re making the pilot episode of Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family.
But distractions abound. Casey pulls out a hidden gun from under his mother’s mattress, and the guys have several impromptu photo shoots with it; they break for McDonald’s and get caught up playing with their food and plastic cups; they travel to a handful of friends’ houses, where arguments with parents and, eventually, Matt’s baby’s mother begin to eat into their precious studio time. As if all that isn’t pathetic enough, it’s presented through the lens of a crappy camcorder and stitched together in a primitive form of iMovie, complete with generic title cards, star wipes, and tinny music. One of the film’s best gags comes at the very beginning: It starts with a blue screen and a “please insert a cassette” message before jumping through several bits of home video footage that are clearly being erased to make room for the behind-the-scenes monstrosity we’re about to witness.
Calling Rap World’s narrative “loose” or “meandering” would be an understatement. What O’Malley and co-director and co-writer Danny Scharar have created here is something akin to Christopher Guest’s anarchic improv comedy in films like Waiting for Guffman, mixed with the banal, meme-ready insanity of an I Think You Should Leave sketch. O’Malley and his cast worked from a similar template as Guest: Every scene was written and blocked out, but much of the dialogue and mannerisms were improvised.
When the trio finally does begin recording their album, it’s hard to keep a straight face when Casey, decked out in his sideways-cocked brimmed beanie and black-and-white Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt, raps lines like, “I’m a half-Jewish hillbilly/The other half is a Free Willy/My mind is like Hulk Hogan mixed up with Aladdin” with no sense of flow over preset GarageBand-type beats.These are the types of guys who, if they didn’t have each other, might aspire to be mass shooters—but wouldn’t have the gall or skillset to pull it off. That strain of pitch-black humor is followed to the film’s conclusion, where Casey’s mom’s gun brings things to a hilariously blunt halt. I can’t remember the last time a comedy ended with a gag this dark—and the completed (read: terrible) songs playing over it make the whole thing even funnier.
As sidesplitting as this movie can be, the one lingering critique I have is its length. At 57 minutes, it’s just over the bare minimum runtime for a feature-length film, yet it feels like it could’ve been even shorter. Some of the crew’s diversions in the middle of the movie, where several ancillary characters are introduced, drag on a bit too long or feel too manufactured, breaking the spell of its Too Many Cooks by way of Blair Witch Project atmosphere.
Besides, Rap World is at its best when it plays into the disaffected delusions of its main cast. When Jason makes vlogs for his unseen MySpace girlfriend while sitting in Casey’s bathtub, you can imagine the glitter-bombed Top 8 he aspires to be a part of. When Matt’s partner chastises him over their kids realizing how much of a loser he is, it fuels the studio session where he bravely rhymes “Tobyhanna” with “Benihana” over a piano track I’m sure Jason thought evoked the synth lines on Wiz Khalifa’s “Chewy.” If you grew up in a Northeastern suburb in the late 2000s or early 2010s like I did, chances are you knew people exactly like this, pounding brews in a Lowe’s parking lot years past their high school prime, watching the world pass them by.
But Rap World never feels too malicious—it ultimately has a soft spot for these lonely weirdos, their perpetual bromance and dreams of rap superstardom blocking out every other aspect of their lives. “Our family is literally like The Addams Family, also, if they were drinking a lot,” Matt stiltedly tells his sister in the middle of an otherwise silly backseat play fight. It’s a strikingly sad moment played for laughs, which stick to the throat as a result. You almost get a sense that O’Malley and company want to save these manchildren from their eternal hell of basement hangs and parental disappointment. But then you hear the music and see the gun go off, and you realize they’re mercilessly tapping into a specific era of white suburban malaise a little too well.
