Conner O’Malley’s Rap World Is the Manic Movie of the Summer

Rap World is a hangout movie. A period piece. A mockumentary with the feel of a found footage film. A movie destined to wind up on YouTube, oozing with irony, manic energy, nostalgia, and melancholy. 

The year is 2009. Three pals, played by Conner O’Malley, Jack Bensinger, and Eric Rahill, and a fourth behind the camera (Danny Scharar, the film’s co-director) have one night in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania to make it big. They have decided to record a rap album and a documentary about its making. The question is not whether they will do it, but how famous will they get? 

O’Malley, in his directorial debut, plays the alpha, an aspiring rapper who works at a local movie theater chain. It is there that the film begins, and where he connects with his gleeful collaborators as they launch a night brimming with hope and energy. That all will soon fade, as most great sleepovers do. But the difference here is that the ages of the men range from their mid-20s to early-30s, adding yet another layer of blissful ignorance and a real grief for time lost to their ambitious plans for the evening. 

Among the great ironies of Rap World, which premiered in New York last week before ravenous crowds at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is that it is, in fact, the very kind of artwork—a byproduct of a crazed, friendship-fueled creative process—that the frequent collaborators are, in fact, spoofing. Thus the end result is not a punch down at delusional home music and moviemaking, but a celebration of the enterprise, giving Rap World a warm, wholesome feel, equally hilarious and heart wrenching. 

Our heroic trio behave as if they were much younger, embodying, perhaps, the creators’ past selves of 2009. The filmmakers’ careful set design feeds the celebratory and melancholic milieu depicted. They shoot the movie theater chain as a sacred space, its halls a place to play, its back corridors and empty screening rooms a wonderful mystery, even for those who must clean up the mess once the patrons leave. And then there is the technology. All of the film is shot on a digital video camcorder. A Samsung cell phone equipped with that very cool feature of a sliding keyboard connects the boys to the others they will encounter throughout the night. Televisions with built-in VCRs and portable DVD players compete for their attention. And, of course, they play the Nintendo Wii, that gaming system full of false promises and hope, a perfect symbol for the outset of the Obama years. 

Rap World taps into a geographic nostalgia too. The group of white dudes prowls the suburbs, proud (in their own way) to be “lifers” in town, yet at the same time grasping for more. The film deftly finds the comedic absurdity in this reality without condescension, or fetishizing in a way that sanitizes the similar real world(s) with which they are, clearly, intimately familiar. There is fun and beauty in their palpable sense of place. As O’Malley’s character says, some of the greatest moments of their lives are spent in parking lots. 

To the eye watching solely for pleasure, Rap World masks the labor of its own production. As the creators revealed in a post-screening Q&A, the 56-minute film was cut together from 70 hours of footage by Bensinger, also the film’s editor. The joy that comes with a film like Rap World is to watch a work that is good but also “bad.” It is an authentically poorly-shot and edited film, made by fictional dudes without a clue and actual ones who know what they’re doing. 

Dramatically, the arc of the film so finely captures the joys and complexities of male friendship. The night begins with an overflow of excitement and anticipation. Then ensues the obligatory catch-up, where things get real. A rebound comes in the form of pranks, fast food, and testosterone. Alcohol, weed, and video games follow. This fun leads the trio to briefly ditch their plans and refuel at the grocery store, before heeding the siren’s call to attend a party, a decision that sends their night through detours that bring them back to reality. As time marches on, things only get realer. They grow more comfortable, surviving the night together. Finally, they get back on track: the budding rap album is back on. 

At the post-screening Q&A, the filmmakers seemed reluctant to label their work, even hesitant to call it a film. Of course it is. Rap World so clearly recalls the best of the underground movie tradition. Filmmakers like the Kuchar brothers come to mind. The movie has a distinct visual style, resonant of the collaborators’ past works, including those found on O’Malley’s popular YouTube channel. It is on that platform Rap World will probably live. And it makes sense, for it is where the fictional creators depicted would have most likely placed their opus. Over 15 years, it would have garnered perhaps a few dozen views, a couple likes, and maybe even a comment. The dudes would pull it up less and less as time passed. But it would remain there, just as beautiful.