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Eminem has built a career on two of the most noxiously mundane personality traits under the sun: hating his mom and hating his ex. But, as 8 Mile reminds us, it takes true talent to make such slim pickings into art. In the capable hands of Curtis Hanson, and the noble tradition of the scrappy 80’s self-fulfilment fantasy, the rapper’s first foray into cinema veers from a puff piece to a cringeworthy yet authentic piece of self-mythology.

With the unenviable mission of endearing a self-proclaimed ‘trailer trash’ rapper to the mass market, even twenty years on 8 Mile still seems worthy of its critical and commercial success. Under its veneer of crotch-grabbing braggadocio, the movie, like its star, brims with the angry fear of a scared little boy in a hollowed-out America. Eminem may not be headed to the arthouse circuit any time soon, but he sure can play himself, putting the biopic, like his music, in the Johnny Cash tradition of the semi-fictionalised, snarling no-gooder. And it’s not the Hollywood doppelgangers of his friends and family who really costar in the drama; rather, the run-down city of Detroit, which matches Em’s status in the nightmares of suburban moms, takes centre stage in this watchable yet raw version of reality.

Jimmy Smith, aka Rabbit, aka obviously Eminem, ekes out a grim existence in his trailer park with his booze-sodden, promiscious mom (Kim Basinger) and kid sister Lily (Chloe Greenfield). Props here to Eminem for acting out such a nakedly Oedipal setup with such commitment: his girlfriend’s dumped him, and now to add insult to injury, his high school buddy is smashing his mom. (Cherry on the cake: Basinger shares a name with Em’s real-life, much-despised ex wife.) Rabbit’s rap dreams are guttering in the claustrophobic toilets of his friend Future’s rap club, an opener that sets up the giddy heights of ‘palms sweaty, Mom’s spaghetti’ in the film’s climax.

Like Rocky Balboa, Rabbit lives in a permanent training montage, scribbling down rhymes while glaring tragically out the bus window en route to the metalworks. Here, however, the sunshine of Eye of the Tiger, is replaced with hip-hop that hangs over ugly, raw shots of a defiantly hopeless Detroit. The spark in his life comes from his friends, who give Hanson a neat angle onto the looming issue of race relations in a movie about rap. Rabbit, the film argues, forms his social and musical networks around shared experience and cold, hard talent. He and his friends live at home with their moms, work dead-end jobs, hang out the same rap clubs. And at the crux of the film, after enduring his share of humiliation - gamely reenacting it onscreen, no less - Em also gets his due recognition from the scene.

Most appealingly, Rabbit’s ultimate victory rings hollow; no Breakfast Club freeze-frame and sky punch here. Instead, for all the ciphers he can spit, all the furtive office tomfoolery he enjoys with wannabe model Alex (Brittany Murphy), all the catharsis he gropes for in a showdown with his mother, Jimmy remains imprisoned by his attitude. All women are enemies in Em-land: Alex may believe him, but her vacuous feminine brain leads her to betrayal. His mom proves a lost cause, morphing from a flawed, disappointing figure with addiction problems and poor financial acumen into a font of musical inspiration. Only his saintly younger sister escapes the hair-raising misogyny with which the rapper’s made a great deal of music, and money: there’s a welcome forbearance from the rapper’s customary lingo of ‘faggots’ and ‘bitches’, plus a more nuanced portrayal of his Freudian bugbears. The contours of bitch-hoe caricature swirling around both mother and love interest in 8 Mile are positively feminist compared to Eminem’s charming musical address to Kim on The Marshall Mathers EP: “No one can hear you! Now shut the fuck up and get what's coming to you! You were supposed to love me!! Now bleed bitch, bleed!! Bleed bitch, bleed!! Bleed!!”

And they gave Kendrick the Pulitzer…

Rather like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, Em’s version of Rabbit is a prince meant for better things, ultimately renouncing many of his bum compatriots in a manner that smacks of sacred, artistic duty rather than megalomania. He may not present himself as a saint, but Em clearly takes a sick pride in his story on film, the same warped yet justified right to emotional self-sabotage that he rolls out on every album. Despite the friendships, he is always alone, and at the end of the movie he walks down a rotting alley toward the still lonelier road of fame.