Programme Notes: California Schemin'

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California Schemin’ Programme Notes

by Alistair Harkness - film critic, The Scotsman

Please note: these programme notes contain descriptions of plot and characters and are best read after watching the film.

At his introduction for the Glasgow Film Festival premiere of California Schemin’, James McAvoy talked eloquently about why he wanted to make a Scottish film with universal appeal for his directorial debut. Referring to art as a mirror in which we can see ourselves reflected, he pointed out how the lack of films created in Scotland means we only ever see a small part of our society reflected back at us, which is why it’s important to make more films here. Dramatising the stranger-than-fiction story of a pair of aspiring rappers from Dundee who embarked on a misbegotten mission to expose the hypocrisy of the music industry in the early 2000s, California Schemin’ certainly offers an intriguing portrait of 21st century life in Scotland.

Loosely based on the memoir of the same name by Gavin Bain (played here by newcomer Séamus McLean Ross), the film follows him and his former best friend Billy Boyd (Samuel Bottomley) as they reinvent themselves as an obnoxious Californian rap duo called Silibil N’ Brains after their efforts to break into the music industry using their own accents is met with indifference and humiliation. It’s a film in which it’s easy to get swept up in the pair’s us-against-them bravado, especially when a record company offers their American alter-egos a big money deal. But what starts as a lark quickly turns dark. ‘You know none of this is real, right?’ Billy’s no-nonsense girlfriend Mary (Lucy Halliday) asks him at one point. McAvoy’s film explores the tension that erupts when it becomes apparent that neither of them do.

It’s a story previously told on film in the documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax (Jeanie Finlay, 2013), which captured the hedonistic highs and lows of their bizarre journey through extensive use of a treasure trove of early digital video footage they shot of themselves (McAvoy recreates some of it in his film). But while that film’s titular callback to the Malcolm McLaren/Sex Pistols mockumentary The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980) remains a bit of a misnomer given that Silibil N’ Brains’ subsequent implosion barely caused a ripple in the industry (they were quietly dropped from Sony amid a corporate merger), The Great Hip Hop Hoax is notable for offering a less sympathetic portrait of Bain as an unrepentant striver who, as of 2013, was still intent on getting his due (watched today it actually brings to mind Jono McLeod’s 2022 documentary My Old School, another Scottish tale of deception).

By contrast, McAvoy’s film is much more empathetic, though there are still elements that make for a darker treatise on fame’s false allure, bringing to mind films such as influencer satire Ingrid Goes West (Matt Spicer, 2017) and music industry creep-fest Lurker (Alex Russell, 2025) — two movies that have adapted the themes of Martin Scorsese’s prescient 1983 flop The King of Comedy for an age in which the barriers to fame have never been lower.

Coincidentally, that’s also one of the biggest ironies of the Silibil N' Brains’ story. Emerging before MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter caught fire (and before X Factor transformed pop music on TV), they were simply ahead of their time. Today their content-creating instincts would likely have made them TikTok superstars and McAvoy’s film cannily captures the dramatic irony of this. In California Schemin’, Gav, Billy and Mary all work dispiriting day jobs at a call centre providing tech support for dial-up internet users and we watch them comically try to talk customers into signing up for a new-fangled technology called broadband.

It’s a fun joke, but it also illustrates McAvoy’s skill at teasing out weightier themes within the framework of something more accessible and mainstream, something Bain in particular always envisaged when considering what a film version of his story might look like. Back when he was working on his memoir in 2008, he told The Guardian that he could see it as a cross between the Eminem biopic 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002) and the true-life con artist movie Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002). Those are certainly useful reference points for McAvoy’s film, yet so too is Tootsie, Sydney Pollack’s 1982 hit comedy about a struggling method actor (Dustin Hoffman) whose inability to get work despite his obvious talent inspires him to perpetuate an outrageous hoax on the industry he loves and loathes.

California Schemin’ is, after all, a movie about acting and striving for authenticity in performance, something McAvoy knows all about. Indeed, on his press tour for California Schemin’, he has talked openly about some of the subtle and not-so-subtle prejudices he’s faced within his profession on account of his Glaswegian accent. California Schemin’ taps into this in direct and indirect ways. Being derisively compared to The Proclaimers at a talent showcase in London is the catalyst for Gav and Billy’s scheme, while a mural depicting Ewan McGregor’s ‘It’s shite being Scottish’ rant from Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) becomes a sly visual motif for the more nuanced and harder-to-define inferiority complex the film’s protagonists feel.

McAvoy also finds sensitive and sympathetic ways to tease out the mental health toll the hoax took on everyone — and he smartly puts Gav and Billy’s frustrations at not being given a fair shot because they’re Scottish in the wider context of a music industry rife with complex racial dynamics – something he explores in a light touch way via the boys’ relationship with Tess (Rebekah Murrell), the talent scout who vouches for them and finds her own career, as a woman of colour, compromised as a result.

But McAvoy is not hypocritical when it comes to casting either. So while McLean Ross and Halliday are Scottish (he also casts himself as the blowhard Scottish owner of the fictional record company that signs Silibil N’ Brains), he had no hesitation about casting rising star Samuel Bottomley in the role of Billy simply because he hails from Yorkshire. Bottomley, subsequently had to navigate Scottish and American accents in the film, on top of mastering the playful wordplay of Silibil N’ Brains’ rap style. He does it all flawlessly.

And on the subject of the film’s music, both Bottomley and McLean Ross (the son of Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh) also had to perform in front of 2000 extras for a climactic gig recreating their support slot for Detroit hip-hop collective D12. Set and shot in the Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow’s legendary concert venue, it’s the rousing high-point of the film. It’s also one of the biggest liberties McAvoy took with the story. The real gig happened at Brixton Academy in London. But in a film about blurring fact and fiction, it feels right.

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