GANGSTA rap could not be suffering a worse press, taking the blame for gun crime or, less seriously, upsetting a mother and her daughter shopping at Sarah Coggles in York.

So how ironic that the 'salvation' of rap is now in the hands of its most controversial exponent, one Marshall Mathers, alias Eminem.

Like Elvis before him, he has made a white-boy mint from a black art form and then moved into the movies, and an impressive transfer it is too, certainly by comparison with any pop star from Cliff to Billy Fury, Bowie to Sting.

8 Mile is not an ambitious start but an assured one, aided no end by Curtis Hanson, director of LA Confidential and Wonder Boys. Eminem, bottle-blond hair now back to a dark crop, plays Jimmy Smith Jr, alias insecure young rapper Rabbit, a thin streak of trailer trash from the 8 Mile Rd Mobile Court in dilapidated Detroit. Any similarity to a real person with the initials M and M is entirely intentional.

The year is 1995, and like his friends both white and black, Rabbit is doing a dead-end job (at a car plant), reluctantly living at home with his abused, penniless mom (Kim Basinger, playing against glamorous type) and his little sister, while looking for his one chance to express himself and his anger. That chance comes in a competitive war of words, the rapper battles at hip-hop clubs that have the intensity and bursts of bravura of boxing matches.

Not for nothing is Eminem's Rabbit mockingly called Elvis by his rivals because 8 Mile has rap's answer to the King doing his own king thing in a hip-hop twist on the Rocky movies. Yet Eminem scores highest points for the vulnerability he brings to the disaffected, quietly intense Rabbit: such a contrast to his Slim Shady bad-boy act, never more so than when Rabbit sings a tender lullaby to his sister.

Curtis, meanwhile, gives a master-class in using a blighted setting for maximum effect, Motor City cast as a junkyard.

Updated: 09:44 Friday, January 17, 2003