California Schemin: The Real Hip-Hop Hoax

California Schemin' (15, 107 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: An effervescent delight 

You, Me & Tuscany (12A, 104 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: Cheesier than mozzarella 

Effervescent is the best adjective to describe I Swear, which was my film of 2025. It has to be an eff-word, obviously. 

It will do, too, for the cutely titled Schemin', which is also rooted in Scotland and has the same irresistible warmth and story-telling vigour. 

Like I Swear, California Schemin' – a tremendously assured directing debut by James McAvoy – is based on a true story: that of a Scottish hip-hop duo who called themselves Silibil N' Brains.

In the early 2000s they kept pitching themselves to London-based record companies, who refused to take them seriously, largely on account (it seemed) of their accents.

So they came up with a masterstroke, broadening their vowels and pretending to have arrived in London straight outta California, rather than Dundee. That made all the difference.

The film's own masterstroke lies in the casting. Samuel Bottomley and Seamus McLean Ross play, respectively, Billy Boyd ('Silibil') and Gavin Bains ('Brains'). 

Ross, incidentally, in a neat example of life overlapping with art, is the son of Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh of the band Deacon Blue, genuine Scottish pop royalty.

Bottomley is a Yorkshireman but, to my ears at least, sounds convincingly like a Taysider.

They both give delightful performances, impeccably supported by Lucy Halliday as Billy's sweet but doughty girlfriend Mary.

In Dundee, Billy and Gavin are engaging scallywags working in telesales, but with dreams of hip-hop stardom.

McAvoy himself plays a record producer, on the lookout for 'the next Eminem'.

When auditions are announced, the pair travel gleefully to London. They know they have talent, and fully expect to be snapped up. Instead, condescendingly dismissed as the 'rapping Proclaimers', they return to Scotland, dejected but not defeated.

Billy applies his telesales logic: 'You've always got to give the customers what they want.' With that in mind, they resolve to try again, this time pretending to be Americans. 

So now they are working on two acts – the hip-hop, but also the pretence. The latter definitely needs work.

They tell another record executive, played by James Corden, that they're from LA, and when he asks where, they mention the only place they know: Beverly Hills. Clocking his disbelief, they add a few desperate details. It's a very funny scene.

As they gain confidence and decide on a method-acting approach – 'no more Scottish, even to each other' – California Schemin' begins to echo all those lovely impostor films, the likes of Tootsie (1982), Mrs Doubtfire (1993) and Catch Me If You Can (2002), even Some Like It Hot (1959). That's illustrious company. 

And in its funny, exuberant, tremendously likeable protagonists, it also reminded me a little of Bill Forsyth's eternal charmer Gregory's Girl (1980), which is never a bad thing.

Yet there's nothing derivative about McAvoy's film, slickly written by Elaine Gracie and Archie Thomson. 

It tells a cracking story with terrific verve, and makes it impossible not to invest in these two pals; to rejoice for them once they start achieving their dreams – but also to fret for them, in case they are spoiled and soured, like so many before them, by the trappings of success.

Sure enough, the fun soon gives way to friction, because once they are scouted and sign a record deal, then go on tour, Billy's objectives and Gavin's begin to diverge.

The original plan was to get signed as Americans and then sensationally reveal themselves as Dundonians, ideally on The Oprah Winfrey Show, thereby exposing the shallowness of the record industry. 

But success is seductive, and it depends on them pretending to be people they're not. So gradually, a comedy of deception turns into something much more profound, a story about authenticity. It's a feelgood film with real depth. I loved every minute of it. 

The opposite was true of You, Me & Tuscany, a romantic comedy so lacklustre, so insipidly acted and feebly scripted that you can hardly believe it got made. 

The director is Kat Coiro, whose 2022 romcom Marry Me was modestly enjoyable, but this is a cliché-driven dud. 

Halle Bailey plays Anna, a would-be chef down on her luck in New York City whose encounter one evening with a dishy Italian called Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) leads her inexorably to Tuscany and, via a series of silly misunderstandings, into the arms of Matteo's even dishier cousin Michael, played by Bridgerton's Rege-Jean Page. 

He was once favourite to be cast as the next James Bond, so it's dispiriting to find him walking into the crosshairs of a proper panning. 

As in the infinitely superior California Schemin', deception is at the heart of the story. In a parody of Tuscany, where absolutely everyone speaks English, Anna masquerades as Matteo's fiancée for reasons far too idiotic to explain. 

The film's only solidity lies in the lovely Tuscan landscape. Everything else is hollow. 

Also showing...

My favourite Jim Jarmusch film will probably always be the exquisitely melancholic Paterson (2016), which also features one of the all-time great canine performances, by an English bulldog called Nellie.

But the runner-up would have to be the splendid 1991 anthology Night On Earth, and his latest, Father Mother Sister Brother (15, 110 mins, ****), is constructed in the same intriguing way, with three separate stories linked both thematically and by tiny, almost superfluous details such as the phrase 'Bob's your uncle'.

That might sound a little weird, pretentious even, but Jarmusch is a clever writer and uses top-class acting talent (Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Charlotte Rampling, among others) to tell a trio of tales about quite different families and their situations, set in America, Dublin and Paris.

They all focus on the strained relationship between children and their parents: 'Shall I be mother?' asks an uptight novelist played by Rampling, preparing to pour tea. 

'You might as well start sometime,' says her daughter (Vicky Krieps), snidely. That's the second story; the third one is about twins clearing their parents' Paris apartment after a plane crash. It's a slow-moving film, but never less than thought-provoking.

Undertone (15, 94 mins, ***) is a low-budget, supernatural horror film in which Evy (Nina Kiri), caring for her dying mother, begins to find unsettling parallels between her surroundings and the creepy-stories podcast she co-hosts.

It's a decent debut by writer-director Ian Tuason – at least until it gets carried away in the final act.

All films reviewed here are in cinemas now.