Freddie Gibbs makes a successful screen debut in the feature film “Down with the King”, awarded the Grand Prix at the 47th Deauville Festival in 2021. A drama in which he lends his features to a rapper who goes into exile in the American campaign to rejuvenate, but who cannot find peace.
Down with the King : life, love, cows
Famous for his two major albums with producer Madlib, Pinata and Bandana, but also for his taste for irreverence, his nonchalance and the pleasure he takes in titillating his colleagues, Freddie Gibbs is undoubtedly one of the best – if not the best – rappers of his generation. This is also the role he plays in the drama Down with the Kingwhich marks his true debut as an actor, he who often has fun playing comedy in his clips, parodying for example the singers Teddy Pendergrass and Rick James on the visuals of his opus entitled freddy.
The musician lends his features here to Mercury Maxwell, better known under the pseudonym of ‘Money Merc’. Tired of the tumult of urban life, the character leaves to settle in the depths of the American countryside in order to prepare his new project. While he takes a liking to the life of a farmer, which he discovers alongside Bob (Bob Tarasuk), he is constantly brought back to his job by his manager, who imposes pressure on him from the record company and slows down his inspiration.
Merc owes more to face his paranoia and his fear of dying, hesitating to stop everything to devote himself fully to his new existence. This desire is reinforced when he gets closer to Michaele (Jamie Neumann), who is trying to leave what she considers a backwater with nothing left to offer her in the future.
Smashing debut for Freddie Gibbs
Second feature film by Diego Ongaro after Bob and the Trees, Down with the King recalls the cinema of the great Kelly Reichardt by several aspects. First of all, there is the need to highlight a rural setting and its forgotten places, like the characters of Bob and Michaele. There is also this ability to take an interest in the pangs of artistic creation without dealing with them in a posed way, as the director did with Show-Up. Finally, there is this taste for wandering and this gift for succeeding in making the protagonists endearing by simply filming them living, without necessarily developing a multitude of interactions or situations serving the plot.
The staging of Down with the King is not as mastered as that of Kelly Reichardt and the film sometimes goes in circles, but there is a real pleasure to see Money Merc / Freddie Gibbs evolve in an environment that he learns to appreciate. The conversations with Bob, the romance with Michaele, his writing and recording sessions, but also his pleasure in imitating pigs while taking care of them… So many sequences that could have caused deep boredom but that Freddie Gibbs captivates with his charismahis magnetism, his marked silences, his spontaneous insults and his humor.
The feature film is almost an extension of the clip Crime Country, minus the irony and the second degree, as the foreground immediately announces, which captures a dramatic gaze from the rapper. A look made for the cinema, in the same way as his voice, his attitude and his gestures.
Down with the King is to be discovered on VOD from September 12, 2022.
