James McAvoy has always been an actor defined by transformation, by the slippery shift between wet-eyed tragedy in Atonement (2007), frothing instability in Irvine Welsh’s Filth (2013), stubborn idealism in the X-Men franchise, and machismo monstrousness in Split (2016) and Speak No Evil (2024). You get the sense, then, that his directorial debut California Schemin’ – based on the true story of Dundee rappers Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, who bluffed their way into a record deal by posing as Americans and skirting the UK industry’s classism and Albaphobia – is his opportunity to slough a few of those layers away.
Here, it’s not the Hollywood star speaking so much as the once-dreamer from a Drumchapel council estate. It’s the pursuit of personal authenticity via, ironically, a story of cultural deception. And that’s lent this otherwise highly marketable, reliably palatable underdog story a welcome kind of restlessness, a barbed edge that’s bubbling right beneath the surface of Elaine Gracie and Archie Thomson’s script.
Bain (Séamus McLean Ross) and Boyd (Samuel Bottomley), dismissed from their first London audition with a snide “rapping Proclaimers” aside, decide to pose as California duo Silibil N’ Brains, and quickly land a record deal with Neotone Records, headed by Anthony Reid (McAvoy, the actor back in full machismo monster mode). Their plan is to reveal the ruse live on television and expose the industry’s biases. Then the money and the fame start to get in the way.
McAvoy playfully establishes both his 2003 setting – diabolical facial hair, MiniDV cam footage, awestruck reactions to the name “Michael Bublé” – and his Dundee and Glasgow portions of the story. There’s a worshipful close-up of a Lorne sausage, Trainspotting graffiti, the Duke of Wellington with a traffic cone on his head. But his real work is with his cast, with Lucy Halliday playing an integral role as Boyd’s girlfriend Mary. McAvoy has, unsurprisingly, turned out to be an actor’s director, and his frames are dominated by his stars’ features, even as they energetically leap around the stage à la Beastie Boys. How vanishingly rare it is to see a film like this use the famous split diopter shot to keep actors both in the foreground and background in focus.
McLean Ross and Bottomley oscillate nicely between naïveté and ravenous ambition. Despite the direct involvement of the real Bain and Boyd, drawing from the former’s 2010 memoir California Schemin’: How Two Lads from Scotland Conned the Music Industry, Gracie and Thomson’s script never forces their likeability, nor instantly absolves them of the damaging repercussions of eradicating their own identity in the pursuit of success.
Because, as light as McAvoy’s touch might be – this is a film, after all, that features a James Corden cameo – there’s more to do here than simply cheer the boys on and hope they get one over on the Oxbridge elite. There are bigger questions to ask, and California Schemin’ is willing to ask them. The scout who first discovers Silibil N’ Brains, Tessa (Rebekah Murrell), is one of the only Black employees at a management company that mines the majority of its profit directly from Black artistry. Those same execs who shun working-class Scots show a near-fetishistic attitude towards working-class America.
The film, then, feels particularly tapped into the specifics of the UK creative industry, as Bain and Boyd wrestle with increasingly complicated feelings about their identity. The less themselves they are, the more the doors seem to open. It’s not hard to imagine that McAvoy himself, at least early in his career, might have related to that struggle. But, with his directorial debut, he’s certainly made his home nation proud.
Dir: James McAvoy. Starring: Séamus McLean Ross, Samuel Bottomley, Lucy Halliday, Rebekah Murrell, James McAvoy. Cert 15, 107 minutes.
‘California Schemin’’ is in cinemas
