Dir: James McAvoy 2026.
Reviewed by Peter Herbert
California Dreamin’ is a wistful 1965 song by The Mamas and Papas about yearning for a better time that filmmakerJames McAvoy recalibrates here as the wish for a better life built on a lie by a couple of musicians. The source of the film is a 2003 true life story involving a couple of streetwise Scottish lads who travelled to London and auditioned a home-grown version of black rap music before a music industry panel.
With dreams crushed and back in a gritty downtown Dundee, littered with graffiti including street art words ‘Its shite being Scottish’, one of the lads’ hits on the idea of them pretending to be visiting American hip hop artists. They return to London for a new audition as Silibil’N’Brains and this time they fool the music industry because it’s not about the music, more about appearance and what can be bought and sold to the public.
James McAvoy is a Scottish born /North London-based actor with a rich and varied acting career on stage and screen. This provides California Schemin’ with an authentic ‘at home’ look for scenes filmed in social housing estates in Dundee and Glasgow. London set scenes are equally detailed including witty uses of the National Express bus terminal at Victoria, underground tube stations, views of the Thames, references to MTV/Island Records and North London settings in Camden Town and Mornington Crescent. These are all important location details that anchor the film’s feel-good energy.
Behind the surface there are hard and challenging themes involving friendship and the latent hypocrisy of the music industry. McAvoy’s feel for actors brings out sincere detailed performances from the casting of Samuel Bottomley and Seamus Mclean Ross. Lucy Halliday has a gentle and pivotal role as a girlfriend who will bring about real change in the lads’ friendship during the closing scenes. McAvoy is riveting as a grumpy cynical music boss.
California Schemin’ is an addition to a recent Brit film genre of real-life music related films including Kneecap,Wild Rose and Back to Black that are indebted to the manic ground breaking energy of the Richard Lester Beatles films. McAvoy’s film is also at times not far removed from the antics of two Northern girls coming to 1960s swinging London in Desmond Davis’s Smashing Time.
It is however the film’s careful more naturalistic style of visual framing from cameraman James Rhodes, feel for the sounds of regional dialect and fresh-faced youthful actors that recall the 1980’s films Gregory’s Girl and Comfort and Joy from Glaswegian filmmaker Bill Forsyth.
For all its frantic energy and charm, California Schemin’ is focused on how people find their way in an often harsh and challenging world and is essentially the tale of two lads who scheme success and discover, in time, that these choices and decisions pave the way to set both free on new paths.
IN UK CINEMAS FROM 10 APRIL 2026