“It must have been so simple for him to prepare for that role! He’s been living like that his entire life! He grew straight into the character, perfected it on stage, and then brought it straight to screen.”

Chances are, quite a few people walked out of 8 Mile making those or similar statements about Eminem. After all, it’s the story of a young rapper from the mean streets of Detroit, much more intellectual from the streets than the classroom. With no steady home life, no car, no father, he’s trying to break into the world of hip-hop, where being white has never been an asset to something that’s always been a crapshoot for anyone.

Sounds a bit like the man in the lead role, doesn’t it? But the fellow himself claims that the story that turned into a visualized version of the song it shoved into soundtrack history isn’t a biopic.

“The movie is not my life,” insists the man who started out as Marshall Mathers and spent time as Slim Shady. “It’s not my life story.” Well, not quite.

“Ever since The Marshall Mathers LP came out (in 2000), I’d wanted to do a movie showing something similar to how I came up, something loosely based on that part of my life,” he explains. “I always believed that a lot of kids would be able to relate to my story, the story of the underdog.”

To be fair, Eminem has always spoken against children listening to his music. “My music is not for younger kids to hear,” he asserts. “That’s why there’s an advisory sticker on it… I’m not a role model and I don’t claim to be.”

Indeed, the underdog story, the common man who pulls out the uncommon accomplishment through skill and maybe a tad of luck, has always been pretty safe territory in the film world. But 8 Mile had a bit more to work with, or against, than most such everyman flicks. As popular as the rapper was amongst his selective crowd – the Mathers LP sold nearly two million albums its first week – he’d been under fire for lyrics laced with profanity, gay slurs, and advocation of violence, especially against women. His duet with Elton John at the 2001 Grammys may have helped Eminem’s image in the gay community, but he’d still arrived on the music scene with more controversy than most have in their careers, and the level went up over the first few years of his career.

Now Eminem and the rest of the crew had to get audiences to buy tickets to a pseudo-biographical film, and the controversy might not have been their friend. This also illustrates a bit of a contradiction in the film world: the tendency of audiences to believe that making a biopic of someone is equivalent to glorifying them, and the stereotype that these films only show the good side of their subjects. That’s the attitude that probably kept The People vs. Larry Flynt from being a box-office smash, and Eminem’s story was at least witnessing the same territory, if not entering it.

“What kept me interested was that I knew I wanted to do something authentic,” Eminem recalls, “and something that had a reason for being out there – I didn’t want to just bank my success.”

He had a meeting that included longtime producer Brian Grazer to discuss the film, still in the writing stages. Then Eminem checked out the first version of the script, and read it like his life story. He and his best friend and longtime rapping partner Proof sat down with another screenwriter, and recalled their past years.

“Sure, I was worried about the acting part of it,” Eminem says. “It wasn’t my world. But Ice Cube (who himself jumped from rapping to acting, best known for the Friday films) dropped some science on me once. He told me that anybody who raps should be able to act…. If something that you’re acting out mirrors something you went through in real life, you have to reenact that experience in a way that can make it believable.”

Shortly thereafter, the final script came back to them, and the line between reality and drama was blurred like crazy, the rapper says.

“We took some things that happened in my life and maybe twisted them a little,” he says, “and added some things and took out some things. If it was based on my life, it would be very limited as to I could do.”

The film title, which Eminem takes credit for, refers to Detroit’s invisible societal equator, a real spot in the Motor City.

“Both side of 8 Mile Road are poor, but there’s a definite dividing line between the black and white sides,” he explains. “(8 Mile Road) separates the city from the suburbs. It’s not really separate the rich and poor, but more the color line.” 8 Mile Road plays a large part in the role, as the movie was taped in Detroit, like many of Eminem’s videos.

When the script, casting, and everything else came together, Eminem would have the lead, playing Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith. And as tough as the lead can be in one’s first major role, Eminem would have some serious onscreen competition: Oscar-winner Kim Basinger, in a character light-years away from anything she’d done before, played his alcoholic mother. The late great Brittany Murphy, with over a dozen films under her belt, would play Alex, Jimmy’s love interest. Proof would also take the screen in the form of character David “Future” Porter, except that he’d be portrayed by Mekhi Phifer, in the midst of his own successful acting career.

With an acting coach at his side, Eminem roared down to his basement and took a crash course in performing.

“The simplest way to describe my ‘theatrical’ education,” he says, “is (that) I was taught how to say the same thing in lots of different ways. Simple, but it really worked. At the same time, a lot of this role was so close to me as a person that it felt natural… It really took me back to the time before I was famous.”

As filming commenced, Eminem spent what little free time he had in a trailer writing “Lose Yourself,” which would become the film’s centerpiece tune. But he also took a few steps back to the rap battle scenes that populate the film. In these wars, two people go face to face on stage and go toe to toe in insult contests, with rhyming lyrics punctuating the word melees, along with the cheers and boos of hundreds of audience members. Many a wannabe rapper has attempted to use these “Open Mic-type” contests as a springboard to stardom, but many fewer have succeeded. Fortunately, Eminem had one of the chosen, and this was where he truly was able to look back at his own memories.

Battling, he said, “was like a sport, like life. If I lost a battle, my entire world felt like it was crumbling. Some people might say, ‘You lost, so get over it. Go back and try again!’ You don’t understand: I just lost a battle, my whole life is over. When you step up on that stage in front of a crowd, if there’s 20 people, if there’s 200 people, your rep is on the line.”

Back when he actually engaged in the rap-offs, Eminem admits, “I was never really thinking about theatrics. But looking back, rap battles were always very visual… It’s like being a conductor, only the orchestra you’re conducting is your own stupid ass.”

These scenes absolutely set the stage for the main points of the film, demonstrating Jimmy’s absent self-confidence at the start, the fortitude that rap instills in him as things move forward, and his way of defeating those that wronged (and jumped and physically assaulted) him near the end.

But some other scenes were a bit easier on Eminem and everyone else, like the unplanned high-speed tryst that he and Murphy share in the back room of Jimmy’s workplace.

“The lovemaking scene probably took about a minute and a half to film,” he exaggerates. “It wasn’t fun – being basically naked in front of other men and women you don’t know – but luckily I don’t have too much of a problem showing my ass to the world.”

That’s all well and good for him, and for many others. But beyond that, throughout the film, audiences hear and feel snippets of “Lose Yourself,” the song that we won’t hear in its entirety until the closing credits.

Still, the film had its tragic elements. In April 2006, Proof (who’d actually had a small role in 8 Mile as a battle rapper) was shot to death on 8 Mile Road itself. Murphy suddenly died just before Christmas 2009.

“I have never felt so much pain in my life,” Eminem says of the day he learned of Proof’s death. “It’s a pain that is with me to this day, a pain that has become a part of who I am.”

It’s just my opinion, but the film marked the first time that we, the general public, got to see the man behind the lyrics. We were all familiar (if not impressed or enthralled) by Eminem’s voice, rhymes, and tunes, and the persona he used in public gave the impression that there wasn’t much space between on the stage and off it. But 8 Mile not only gave him a shot at showing his ability as an actor, it allowed us to see where he (in a slightly dramatically altered form) came from.

8 Mile may not have changed the public perception of Eminem’s music, and chances are he certainly wasn’t trying to fix something that was hardly broken, but we now could understand him a bit more. Biopics are especially good at showing the human side, complete with fear, uncertainty, and determination of celebrities, and 8 Mile did precisely that. Words like “scared” and “sensitive” were rarely used to describe the Eminem we saw before the film came out, but watching his life story (or “life story”) might have expanded our vocabulary a bit. Until his own biopic came out in 1997, many people couldn’t see beyond the sex-crazed misogynistic loudmouth that Howard Stern displayed on his daily radio show; Private Parts changed quite a few opinions about him; Eminem’s flick had the same effect.
As I watched 8 Mile for the first time here in May 2011, I looked back to the time I’d first heard the song “Lose Yourself.” I’d always considered it something of a “fire-up” song (i.e., the type of tune you listen to to get your adrenaline pumping for a workout or marathon), but there’s more to this song than meets the ear. There’s a reason, not only why it helped sell so many albums, but why it earned an Oscar at the next ceremony.

It sends a message to anyone with a dream and a passion, anyone who’s trying to make it in the tough worlds of movies and music.

“Lose yourself in the music, the moment, you own it, you better never let it go. You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime.”

For many people, it doesn’t even come once. But to make it all the way, to go as far as Eminem and others like him have, we indeed need to lose ourselves in the music, or the