The useful thing about the scam in California Schemin’ is that it solves a problem the music industry created. Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd arrive with songs and Scottish accents. Industry listeners treat the latter as disqualifying evidence about the former. When the pair return as Sillibil N’ Brains, with American voices and a story about where they came from, the same ability acquires a commercial identity. James McAvoy’s film understands the absurdity immediately. The more interesting work is in showing what the pair have to give up to keep hearing yes.
As Gavin and Billy, Séamus McLean Ross and Samuel Bottomley have to play people discovering an act and finding themselves on either side of it. The sound of a new voice can be thrilling when a friend is there to hear you pull it off. In public the joke takes on an altogether different rhythm. Somebody asking an innocent follow-up question can leave the two of them calculating how much the other has already said. The actors can let a piece of business that was funny in rehearsal become an awkward negotiation over who is going to speak next.
McAvoy knows the humiliations behind the joke. A gatekeeper who laughs at the accent gets to think of himself as possessing taste. The performers have to decide whether to keep insisting that he heard them wrong or offer him a new story he already knows how to buy. The film is strongest when it allows that professional calculation to come from delight as well as injury. These are rappers making something together. The impersonation would have little to sell if the two had no pleasure in trading lines or no feel for the sounds they borrow.
There is an instructive difference between the spectacle of a stage act and the interviews that follow a breakthrough. Onstage it can be part of the fun that an audience is hearing a constructed voice. An interview needs the construction to pass as background. The same bit of invention becomes the identity on which further opportunities depend. McAvoy’s actors make that new obligation visible in the difference between the ease of sharing an act and the stiffness of having to account for it. The stage gives the pair cover because music is already a performance. Everything the business asks them to do offstage gradually makes performance harder.
Rebekah Murrell’s Tessa helps make the industry legible from the inside. Spotting the duo at an underground show requires the ear the larger business claims to have. Once the act is legible to people like her, though, the newly available relationships depend in part on the story that brought it through the door. That is a harder arrangement to judge than a simple joke about gullible executives. People can recognize ability and still misunderstand the terms on which it reached them. The movie could give Tessa more room to work out that contradiction on her own terms.
The film comes from Bain’s account of the experience. There is a persuasive trace of that angle in the way the caper brings questions about loyalty back to the friendship. The lie can feed two different appetites. One is the wish to get a hearing. The other is the wish to keep being the person who commanded a hearing, long after the point about prejudice has been made. The difference is hard to establish from inside a performance, which is where the leads earn their keep. Each can make the other’s next line feel exciting and, a little later, costly.
That difference is also why the film has less need of the usual biographical proof that the group had made it. A succession of successes can make a career easier to summarize and the strain harder to believe. Their acceptance by someone who knows the music is a better test of the scheme than any pile of publicity. Tessa’s confidence raises a possibility neither man can comfortably explore. She might have heard them out if they had come to her as themselves. The lie forecloses the experiment just when they have met a person whose answer would have meant something.
There are recognizable beats in the ascent and the unraveling. Exposure supplies a clean climax for a story whose most uneasy questions belong to ordinary days of maintaining a career. By the time other people start comparing notes, Gavin and Billy have already had to hear themselves accept validation that comes with the condition that they sound like somebody else. McAvoy is good enough with the performers to make that smaller, more repetitive injury worth following. A little less reliance on the machinery of the rise-and-fall picture would leave it more space.
