Dicking Around: Origins

Winnie Code considers Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar’s “Rap World.”

By Winnie CodeOctober 30, 2024

• Film

If there’s a gun in act one, flirt with the gun in act two. Treat it like a boy.
—Laura Adamczyk, “Gun Control”

WHILE MAKING MIKEY AND NICKY, Elaine May slept with a gun under her pillow. She began filming in 1971, and the picture wasn’t released until just before Christmas of 1976. What happened in between lives in showbiz infamy, landing May in what is colloquially known as “director jail.” Rap World (2024) co-directors Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar made their movie in a less violent though similarly fraught way. They started and finished filming in Airbnbs over “six to eight weekends” during COVID-19 lockdown and initially had a soundtrack composed of more than a dozen effectively unlicensable megahits that they were, in fact, unable to license. The film was released only last week, on O’Malley’s YouTube channel, scrubbed of the famous cues unless diegetic.

I am not grasping for comparisons here. These are both movies about old friends, men, however stunted, roaming around their Pennsylvanian hometowns—for one of them, for the last time. Men who thought they wouldn’t still be just barely scraping by. Both films took years to shoot and edit, and years to be delivered to an audience. Both created a truly shocking amount of footage. Both had intended final cuts that were spoiled by the realities of money and power. Neither employed a fight coordinator. One is a comedy; one was just supposed to be.

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Rap World centers on Matt (O’Malley) and Casey (Jack Bensinger), best friends and co-workers at what is surely the only multiplex in town. It’s January 2009, for some reason. Matt and Casey have dreams beyond the theater: they want to make a rap album about Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, and tonight their chance has come. They’ve been afforded a studio (Casey’s mom’s basement) and studio time (one night while Casey’s mom is in Costa Rica for plastic surgery meant to solve what would be a brand-new insecurity to most). En route to post-shift, pre-album McDonald’s, Casey reveals to Matt that their musical duo is now a trio; Casey’s friend Jason (Eric Rahill) is waiting at the house and ready to make beats. It’s a betrayal only a best friend can commit: Oh, you thought you were the only one? Tension between Matt and Jason is resolved when the beats are revealed and they are incredibly sick, but that doesn’t mean the boys get on track. They must find the gun kept under Casey’s mom’s mattress, get weed, smoke weed, go to a party, go to another guy’s basement, and meet up with fellow retail employees. When our heroes finally get down to brass tacks, I am proud of them for doing so; as a person who struggles to communicate even one cogent thought per year, it was nice to feel represented on the silver screen.

Despite Rap World’s overwhelming boyishness, it’s not vulgar. Yes, Casey wipes urine on the base of his shirt, but he thinks that’s a life hack he’s generously sharing with his friends rather than an attempt to gross them out. You have to understand: the subtext of a lot of the coarseness among young men in comedy is “I have seen a bagina before.” Not here. I believe in my heart that the Rap World trio have all used price comparison tools on Fleshlights, which is honestly value-neutral. They have romantic arcs over the course of the story, all pure. Matt is trying to reunite with the mother of his kids (Lauren Servideo), Jason sets boundaries with Matt’s flirtatious sister (Edy Modica) since he intends on proposing monogamy to Keira (Ruby McCollister), and Casey is simply able to flirt with a girl on a skateboard (Sarah Sherman). For the most part, the women mock and rebuff these men, who are armed, and don’t die. It’s idyllic.

O’Malley’s output this year has been remarkable in quality and quantity. He’s currently touring his show, the aptly titled “Comedic Humor Tour,” and has this year also released both a special, Stand Up Solutions, and an animated pilot he co-created, Eggland. Both have been acclaimed by critics and fans, the latter group including a quarter million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where the majority of his projects are released. As an actor, he’s recognizable to a wider audience in TV shows and movies in theaters and on streaming platforms: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (2019– ) and The Characters (2016), Netflix; Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), A24; Search Party (2016–22), TBS/HBO Max; Broad City, (2014–19) and Detroiters (2017–18), Comedy Central. While O’Malley was promoting Stand Up Solutions and his new short film “Coreys” on Late Night with Seth Meyers (O’Malley worked there as a writer from 2014 to 2016), the host asked him what he’d been watching lately. “YouTube shorts about guns,” replied O’Malley. This won’t sound flattering, but it is: brother, I can tell. This year and before, his work has benefited from peering into what might be called the “bad internet.” No, not the dark web, just really specific, user-uploaded dreck that gets more and more informationally useless the further into the algorithm you go. As a writer, he burrows into the fabric of the delusional, and produces from it sad, stupid, but hopeful characters. It has made him the king of mumblecore satire, specializing in lampooning online mole people. Like a reverse Nathan Fielder: He’s done observing, he’s very much in the muck.

So when he appears in Rap World, the otherwise naturalistic movie takes on a nearly fantastical texture. Like most of O’Malley’s characters, Matt is a young male victim of internet forums and the eradication of the middle class. Brain-poisoned and too poor for Panera, he’s ready to rap about “credit card debt and who is projecting reality.” His lived experience amounts to becoming the subject of a thoughts-and-prayers press conference. But the joke is that he’s ultimately harmless. He wants things to go well. He’s a gentler reboot of working-class American men: he doesn’t want to hurt people, and in that and that alone he can be called a success. If you’ve seen O’Malley’s earlier work, you know these guardrails exist. His most popular videos on the now-defunct video-hosting site Vine were POV clips where his character menacingly approached men in sports cars only to call them “king,” or “player” and compliment their vehicles. Even as his grimmest character, The Mask’s Tyler Joseph, all O’Malley does is ruin a show at Universal Studios and give two bad haircuts. He is like Bowser capturing and recapturing Princess Peach: at worst a nuisance, at best a story you get to tell about a man you can’t believe exists. He is, all told, not a Scary Guy. If this were as bad as it got for lonely white failures, then we’re right to laugh.

Rap World is an ode to procrastinators, both in process and results. Its method of distribution is tonally correct. The visual experience is one that says “you should be watching this on YouTube, ideally in 11 parts, when you’re supposed to be doing your homework, after your mom, who is pissed, has gone to bed.” The movie is bookended by highs; it opens with a montage of the events that will follow, the guys dicking around in strip malls, rapping, and sticking their tongues out at cameras, and it closes with the one song we can be convinced they finished. Its style wavers between mockumentary and found footage, occasionally lapsing into last-minute PowerPoint presentation. The story is told through the lens of a fourth friend, Ben, played by co-director Danny Scharar, who is largely unperceived except for when posing with the gun, pointed at his head in the powder room mirror.

The snippy French film critic Serge Daney would be consumed by this—he wrote often about multiple ways of seeing and the desire to control one’s image. He would have a point; in the world of the film, the documentarian keeps his image in the edit. Maybe that has less to do with perception and more to do with the desire to play with the toy. But the fact that there is a separate character to document the process can answer that question, when this process could have just as plausibly been filmed by the three musicians holding the camera themselves. These guys are and have a lot of fun, but to bear witness to them is to consider suicide in a latrine.

Per Chekhov and Adamczyk, there is a gun in the first act; there is flirting; it goes off. Otherwise, the film is undeniably audacious formally, functionally, and legally. It’s 55 minutes, which makes it no less impressive that laughter in the screening I attended spanned its entire runtime (save for some nostalgic sighing to the shockingly high-charting soundtrack). There’s physical comedy: Casey launching himself off a couch in a sort of reverse-worm, the three guys doing tricks with their food, anyone dancing, and just how Matt moves around, generally. Many of the laughs come not from sincerity being undercut with a joke but from the reverse, like when Matt declares himself “the white Eminem,” and Casey adds, “My first kiss was in a movie theater.” Both lines get laughs. The self-dubbed “Coolbaugh Crew” hype each other up constantly and, even though a camera is present, it’s clear that the reassurances are for the sole benefit of the recipient. A lot has been and will be said about Megalopolis, also self-funded and released in 2024, being significant for its sincerity, but Rap World deserves to be a part of the conversation as well. It may be a comedy, and honestly the best of the year, but it’s also a story about friends who want to make art for and about their community, which they believe is incomprehensibly special.

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I saw Rap World for the first time in April. Its world premiere closed the inaugural Los Angeles Festival of Movies after selling its tickets out online in a matter of hours. At the post-viewing panel that followed, O’Malley said that the reason for the film’s setting being 2009 was simply that it was when The Dark Knight was released, which is both never mentioned in Rap World at all and technically incorrect. And the world is different since The Dark Knight! We have AI, we have infinite scroll, and everyone’s rent is higher. We have Spotify making it impossible to make a living as an artist. Which reminds me of the legal audacity of the project: in the version screened in Los Angeles, there was a needle drop every few minutes that would reasonably cost about a quarter of a million dollars, or about 12 times the entire production budget. These felt totally unnecessary to the text and also totally the point: none of the music played was produced in moms’ basements, and none of it was three guys’ first try. But it makes sense as the taste of three pretty unreflective guys. For these reasons and hedonism, I feel the absence of the hits in the version released to YouTube. On the other hand, no ActBlue ad featuring Barack Obama preempted Rap World at the premiere. There’s a new epilogue for our cast too. Each line is extremely specific and extremely funny, but it’s hard to compete with the original credits sequence, a low-effort dance number set to Ludacris.

Rap World succeeds as a period piece partly because 2009 is a time no one is yet nostalgic for (though the Nicoletti Salotti–esque chair in Casey’s mom’s basement would go for a cool three grand on resale websites if it were real). For now, artifacts from that era (texting on a Sidekick, posting lesser slurs on Facebook) are just sort of haunting. I don’t know if comedy is, per the adage, tragedy plus time, but the half-generation lag works for Rap World. Some of the costumes even came from producer Harris Mayersohn’s own high school wardrobe, and only kind of fit. It’s cringey and hopeful and maybe one is because of the other.

The creative latitude afforded to a micro-budget film (this one cost $20,000), as in a black box theater production, is that it is well within reason that these characters could be 32, 19, triplets, a tree. So when Matt and Jason’s ages were revealed, I had to wonder why. Matt, Jason, and Casey would be no different at age 75, because that’s just how arrested development and entry-level jobs work. On the other hand, the script benefits hugely from the texture added by irrelevant details: who’s afraid of the water, who’s moving to Alaska, kinds of elder abuse. Rachel Kaly plays Matt’s sister-in-law, Nate Varrone is a party host, Dan Licata says that girls from the other high school in Tobyhanna “smell like halloween masks.” The ensemble is almost frustratingly good. At a different panel, the filmmakers said that a goal of the film was to capture a moment in New York comedy, but you could just as easily assume that Rap World was spawned at the Elysian Theater in Frogtown, Los Angeles, where I’ve seen at least half of the cast perform. It’s perfect that the movie is about adults who have simply refused to move out of their suburban hometown since the actors are all so decidedly at ease in moments of both confrontation and dicking around.

“Some of the best nights of my life were being had in parking lots,” Matt says. It’s his last line. At this, the theater sighed in understanding and tenderness. It’s incontrovertible; the film is a success. O’Malley and Scharar are in total control; the audience is at their mercy throughout. Laughing, wincing, sighing, remembering what it’s like to drive around listening to Coldplay. And it’s no small thing that the movie is about ill-fated childhood friends, either. Maybe I’m wrong about the age thing. Maybe it shows the depth of the creases; maybe it’s how we know these guys will never leave Tobyhanna or each other. I’m left thinking of Mikey and Nicky again. John Cassavetes turns to Peter Falk, whom he has been emotionally torturing all night and all their lives: “I think that’s the reason we’re such good friends. Because we remember each other from when we were kids, things that happened when we were kids that no one else knows about but us. It’s in our heads. That’s how we know they really happened.”