A film could only be produced closer to Montrose if a casting agent were to recruit extras on the High Street and a catering truck were to appear on the Links. Filmed in Dundee and Glasgow, “California Schemin’” is a superior biopic about a snooty London record label which signs a pair of hip-hop rappers without checking any references.
One evening, Tessa, a junior talent scout, discovers Silibil N’ Brains at a dance club. “You’re funny,” she says, after witnessing the euphoria of the audience. “You’re charismatic. You’re American. People love America.” But the “mad kids from California” had never been invited by the venue. Before wowing Tessa with “Tongue Kung Fu,” they had evaded the bouncers and locked the real performers in the dressing room. Tessa gets them twenty minutes to sell their story to her boss, Anthony, whose surliness and lack of affability remain for the entire film. “O.K.,” he says. “We would like to sign you. You’ll cut a single. We’ll offer you a thirty-thousand-pound-signing-on fee.” They negotiate an extra five thousand. “Boys,” Anthony says, mobile phone receiver lodged in his right ear, “welcome to Neotone!”
Silibil calls his girlfriend from a red phone box. “And they actually think you’re American?” she asks. Silibil is, in fact, Billy; and Brains, Gavin—twenty-something dreamers who work together in a Dundee call centre, share a tower-block flat, and are somewhat capable rappers. “California Schemin’” (StudioCanal/Screen Scotland), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, takes for granted that the London-desk-bound music powers-that-be have no idea about the rest of the U.K., hate Scottish accents, and couldn’t care less about their own ignorance.
Billy is much more successful at telesales than Gavin. His fake “Downton Abbey” accent—“Does that sound like something you’d be interested in, sir?”—works. One morning, after closing yet another deal, he says, “You’ve always got to give the customer what they want to hear.” But what they really want to sell is music. They travel by coach to an open audition—in London, inevitably—and perform for two judges who squeal with laughter. “You’re just not what we’re looking for today,” one says. Gavin calls him a “posh wee prick”; the judge turns with a how-dare-he flourish to his companion, “I don’t think I’m posh!” he says. “You’re so not posh!” she says.
Gavin gets it: “It wasn’t the music they were laughing at,” he says, “it was us.” What “they” really want to hear is “Californ-eye-ay” accents, which the duo perfect using well-known clips of American actors, rolling the line “we were on a break,” say, around their mouths several times to check the diction. “We’re going to meet them as Americans,” Billy says, and when they’ve found fame “we’ll come out on a T.V. program—we’ll be truly Scottish.” Girlfriend Mary approves. “You actually sound American,” she says. “You sound, like, entitled!”
The feel-good first half (from the anti-Scottish-bias penny dropping to the exquisitely timed stumbles while getting their backstory together—“Sandy Angeles”; “Beverley Hills Council Estate…scheme…projects”) makes us root for the guys. The audience can enjoy their success without guilt; they have earned the right to feel pleased with themselves after conning the record label.
But the gap between California story and Dundee reality widens. The film’s second half makes the audience very uneasy. Is disaster coming? Gavin suffers a panic attack. We recall the bullying by a group of fourteen year olds in Dundee. His descent into terrible loneliness—that creeps like a deathly shadow over his dazed-looking eyes—is hastened by too much free, neat liquor (and drugs). He demands whisky before a television appearance like some wide-legged cowboy in an Arizona saloon. “I don’t give a flying shit about what people in Scotland think about me,” he says. That is not him.
A runway of women are magnetised by Billy’s California-dude blond highlights. The boys argue about Mary, whose Dundee accent Gavin believes to be a liability, and whose purpose in arriving in King’s Cross Station is to rescue “Billy” from his monstrous alter ego “Silibil.” But Gavin is indulging his new not-listening habit. “Keep it tight until ‘MTV,’” he says, “then we’ll come clean.” Mary knows that it’s time to rein it in. “You know none of this is real, Gavin,” she says. “Stop calling me Gavin,” he says. “It’s Brains.”
Part of the in-joke is that record boss Anthony is also Scottish and doesn’t spot the subterfuge. James McAvoy plays Anthony and directs the picture. He coaxes his principals to an emotional peak at a venue in Glasgow. Gavin, played by a fabulous Séamus McLean Ross, blags his way through a tense and disquieting “reunion” with a famous group of rappers with whom he claims to have had performed. The operatic power of the scene—developed by stunned reaction shots of scout-turned-manager Tessa, Billy, and the other band—is overwhelming. Will Gavin be denounced? Is this the juncture where their lives blow up? Mr Ross plays the scene terrified and wired and desperate (is he so warped that he believes his pack of lies to be true?). Samuel Bottomley warms the audience in the classic-male-lead role of Billy, conflicted between his love for the girl-at-home and the dazzle of a cash-and-prizes life as a rockstar. Rebekah Murrell is persuasive as the over-eager, under-cautious dupe who doesn’t get her facts straight. Lucy Halliday, as Mary, is a stand-in for the audience and tracks from elated to aghast with well-judged calibration. James Rhodes’s flawless photography includes two gorgeous shots of the Tay bridges; Mr McAvoy and he paint the city by having the lads practice their rhymes—“Cassius Clay/Back in the day”—while perched on a park bench.
Silibil tries to fast-talk Mary—to seal another deal—by proposing marriage. “Call me tomorrow as Billy,” she says, sitting on her bed, the camera tight on her broken-hearted-looking face, “the Billy that I knew. Because I really love him.”
Adam Poole
11th April 2026
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