‘WHITEBOYS” is an attempt to make a whole movie out of a single joke: the incongruous sight of a white teenager doing his best to look and sound like a down-with-the-‘hood black rapper in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
It’s very funny to begin with – and in spots throughout – but without a real story to go with the notion of Farm Belt “wiggas,” the humor wears thinner and thinner until it disappears.
It’s a shame because hip-hop culture – and gangsta rap in particular – has a powerful appeal for millions of white teenagers, a phenomenon that’s fascinating.
“Whiteboys” is also a disappointment because it’s the film debut of Danny Hoch, who stars but also co-wrote the film based on a sketch from his solo stage show “Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop.”
Hoch plays Flip, a character we first encounter as he covers a barn with graffiti. Unemployed, Flip and his friends Trevor and James make money selling fake cocaine to mall rats in the nearest town.
The rest of the time the boys craft rap songs, listen to Flip talking about his plans to relocate to a Chicago housing project, and dream about making fortunes as rappers and/or drug dealers.
Flip happens to be an irritatingly dumb and selfish jerk for whom its impossible to feel any sympathy. Most of the movie is taken up with Flip doing his astonishingly seamless black act and explaining that his white skin is just a kind of birthmark.
Unrealistically, Flip’s facade never cracks, perhaps because Hoch is so anxious to show off his perfect ear for dialect.
But two-thirds of the way through there’s a perfunctory road trip, in which the boys go to Chicago with their only black friend, Khalid – an upper-middle-class kid bound for college – so that Flip can meet some real drug dealers and form some kind of multi-state cartel. (Khalid knows somebody who knows somebody who deals drugs at the Cabrini Green projects).
The expedition is, of course, a disaster and ends in a ridiculous firefight between real gangsters and some cops.
But the real problem with the film is that its four screenwriters, including director Mark Levin, cannot seem to decide what they think about the phenomenon they’re dealing with.
Is the whole thug-life aesthetic harmless and amusing, or is it something that’s going to get naive kids into a world of trouble? Are these kids rebels bucking an insipid white-bread culture or victims of a mass-marketing pop-culture machine – or both?