Sundance, Day 3: That's a Rap

In a ground-floor bar at the bottom of Park City's Main Street, sheltered from the blizzard bellowing outside, three rap legends offered a crash-course in Hip-Hop 101.  It was Jan. 21 – day three of the Sundance Film Festival – and Ice-T, Chuck D (front-man for rap group Public Enemy) and Grandmaster Caz (a.k.a. Cassanova Fly) were holding court at the ASCAP Music Cafe, performing past hits, offering discourse on rap's evolution, reflecting on their early experiences as up-and-coming rap artists, and, amid it all, spitting fresh rhymes atop samples old and new.

"It's like a damn family reunion," Chuck D said between songs, referring both to his friends on stage, and apparently, too, the unusually intimate venue for these rap superstars.

The concert was largely restricted to Sundance insiders: filmmakers, publicists, reporters and festival volunteers (as well as their guests). The audience numbered in the hundreds – thousands fewer than the crowds these performers commonly command.

Billed as a promotion for the Sundance-nominated film, "Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap," directed by Ice-T and Andy Baybutt, it featured – like nearly all Sundance premium receptions – a wait-staff circulating with trays of hors d'oeuvres and bartenders serving free drinks.

But this glittery bar scene turned into an electrifying concert as the musicians rapped, bantered, and demonstrated a presence, showmanship, and lyrical and musical talent that provided an electrifying reminder that these artists – entering middle-age and showing grey at the temples – can still strut with the best. They wholly commanded the stage for more than two hours.

"We'll still be here when all your blow's gone," Chuck D concluded in a fiery rap aimed at the latest generation of pop and hip-hop artists whose song catalogues seem to lyricize only and ever about drugs, sex and money. 

Warming to the intimate crowd, the musicians – sitting in blue canvas director’s chairs when they weren’t rapping – talked about the art of rap and demonstrated the genre's nuances, performing and explaining everything from "story raps" to a capella, which are performed without any beats or music, and are instead carried wholly by the lyrics (as Grandmaster Caz boasted before performing his hit Yvette, "My rhymes going to sell this record, goddammit."). They took turns performing, and when not taking the lead chipped in with back-up vocals and the occasional cheer (or good-natured jeer).

"This is fun, right?" Ice-T said with a laugh. It was, to say the least, an understatement,

Film: Filly Brown

This proved an appropriate choice for Day 3, given the night's entertainment at the Music Cafe. Actress Gina Rodriguez plays Majo Tonorio, a twenty-something Los Angelina from a broken home trying to make it as a rap artist. On the surface, the plot and lead character invites comparison to Eminem’s 2002 film, "8 Mile." But “Filly Brown” offers a distinctly different take on Tonorio’s pursuit of her dream.   

Where "8 Mile" focuses almost entirely on the protagonist Jimmy Smith and his struggle to escape a dead-end life of poverty and crime in Detroit, "Filly Brown" follows not just Tonorio, but also her estranged parents and younger sister, as they each must try to navigate through worlds that are changing around them – and situations often fraught with peril.

Tonorio, an apparent rap prodigy, faces near-nonstop pressure from shady record producers and a chauvinistic local rap star. Her father, Jose (Lou Diamond Phillips), who may have a dark past of his own, works for a demeaning Anglo real estate developer – who repeatedly insults and humiliates Jose. Meanwhile, Tonorio's mother (Jenni Rivera), seen only through the Plexiglass window of a prison visiting room, is fighting to cope with constant emotional and physical assaults from fellow inmates. And Tonorio's younger sister, Lupe (Chrissie Fit), is a 17-year-old struggling through the uncertainties of adolescence, with Tonorio substituting for their mother as guide, authority figure and matriarch of the family. The family dynamic and the interweaving of Tonorio’s story with theirs gives the film emotional heft to what might otherwise have been just another riff on “A Star is Born.”

Rodriguez and Fit are both relative newcomers to film, but they each offer compelling performances in their roles as sisters who, although sometimes at odds, nonetheless work to keep the family together. It is Phillips, however, who provides the film's backbone in his fine portrayal of man burdened by a past and struggling with the present as he tries to do the best he can for the family he loves, and a daughter who may have a future he could never dream of for himself.

If the film does, at times, prove overly moralizing – most notably in a late exchange between Phillips and the real estate developer – it is ultimately an entertaining work, one propelled by an infectious rap soundtrack that infuses Tonorio's life, propels her rise, and stays with the audience after the credits roll.