His mother lives hand to mouth in a grim trailer park. His girlfriends are mysteries to him. He works a dead-end job in a stamping factory. His pals are street dumb, clueless and infinitely distractable dreamers hanging around one of the bleakest slums anyone has ever dared to place on film--Eight Mile, the road that separates Detroit's essentially black ghetto from the white world.
Jimmy (Eminem) is a white guy with a gift for hip-hop, that blackest of pop-music genres, who has the implausible dream that his art might lift him out of hopelessness. That was once the dream of Eminem,...