Welcome to Detroit, a city whose trailer parks are littered with hot female supermodels ready to age into old, tired, trashy ex-supermodel mothers. Not to worry, though. All the women have a superstar rapper in the making on every corner.

Jimmy Smith (Eminem) is one of those ready-to-rise rappers. Problem is, Jimmy’s got a small case of stage fright. We follow him in his quest to get over his fears and learn something about him, his trashy mother and his bleak future along the way. Jimmy’s a good guy who’s no stranger to trouble, but he knows when to walk away, something the actor portraying him has had a bit of trouble with.

-Enter Alex (Brittney Murphy), one of the lone female figures in the film with speaking lines. I wish there were more to say about her character, but there’s not. She serves absolutely no purpose other than some sex and a little “Soul Train.”

“8 Mile” has problems. Big problems. In a film that wants the audience to feel the trauma of its main character, it does a horrid job at developing the characters influencing his life. Sure, all of the actors are convincing, but they have nothing to convince us of. The film wants to make a point, but when the audience knows nothing about anyone involved in said point, it fails.

This was a huge shock to me, knowing that director Curtis Hanson was at the helm of this project. The focus of his past works (“Wonderboys”, “L.A. Confidential”) were their strong, rich characters. “8 Mile” starts with a bang, then falls into the “I’m so talented, but my stupid trashy environment is holding me down from being all that I can be” routine. Sure, the ghetto sucks, but tell me something I don’t know.

The one thing Hanson gets right is the freestyle battles. The characters gather at an underground music venue called The Shelter. There, they take turns freestyling, or improvising lyrics, to attack each other with the beat supplied by a DJ.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto gets the camera as close as possible to the rapper’s faces to show us every little bit of energy they’re pouring into their raps. He knows the audience loves to get close and he makes the freestyle scenes seem incredibly personal and artistic.

I always said that he saw something in Eminem that I didn’t, and sitting in the theater watching “8 Mile”, I figured it out. He saw Jimmy Smith. He saw a guy willing to take risks, willing to put it all on the line. But, more importantly, he saw a guy who always found himself in trouble, on the brink of making things much worse, only to hold back and think about the consequences.

“8 Mile” is flawed, but conveys a true story. With each album, Eminem seems to get more responsible and, it appears, he’s growing up. Perhaps Jimmy Smith is not who Eminem was, but who he is turning into.