Biopics about musical artists seem to be pumped out without much consideration of whether or not the artist in question has a story that’s really worth telling. But Giwar “Xatar” Hajabi, a Kurdish rapper famous in Germany, has a genuinely extraordinary life story, having gone from an Iranian refugee who spent time as a child in a Bagdad prison to a gangster to a highly successful artist and businessman. It’s the type of rags-to-riches ascent that you couldn’t script better — which makes it a shame that the thoroughly mediocre “Rhinegold” can’t shape Habaji’s life into anything particularly engaging.
“Rhinegold” comes from director Fatih Akin, a Golden Bear winner for his 2004 breakout film “Head-On,” whose other achievements include a Best Screenplay prize for 2007’s “The Edge of Heaven” and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film for 2017’s “In the Fade.” Despite Akin’s obvious pedigree — and the film’s box office success in Germany — “Rhinegold” is arriving in U.S. theaters this July with little fanfare, after it first premiered at the 2022 Filmfest Hamburg festival and saw a theatrical release in its home country that same year. Part of its muted reception and the protracted wait might come from the genuine disaster that was Akin’s last feature, the serial killer horror film “The Golden Glove,” which was greeted with disgust by critics at the Venice Film Festival. But watching “Rhinegold” itself reveals the main problem: for anyone who isn’t already familiar with Xatar (which, likely, is most American viewers), the biopic gives you little reason to care.
Running at a protracted two hours that feels both tediously long and strangely too short, “Rhinegold” opens in medias res, with an adult Habiji (played charismatically by Emilio Sakraya, doing what he can to give a thoroughly unpleasant character some real layers) in a Syrian prison being interrogated and tortured for the location of stolen gold. It then flashes back to cover Habaji’s childhood and teenage years (his younger selves are played by Baselius Göze and Ilyes Raoul respectively), starting with his parents’ escape from Iran to Iraq, and then their flight from Paris to Bonn. As a teenager, his father’s abandonment of his mother for another woman is a catalyst for Habaji entering a cycle of petty crime, selling pornography and getting into violent fights with weed dealers. As an adult, the petty criminal winds up fleeing Germany for the Netherlands, where he enrolls in a music conservatory but quickly falls into working with a group of gangsters that eventually sends him back to Bonn for a particularly half-baked gold heist, with the goal of using the money to start his own record label “by gangsters, for gangsters.”
Akin, a Turkish-born German, has spent much of his career chronicling the Turkish immigrant experience, and Hajabi’s story hits on similar themes of social disconnect and misplacement. The film never really manages to delve deeply into the circumstances that push Hajabi into his life of crime, painting the story with broad brushstrokes that feel incongruous with its attempts at character study. The pain of his father walking out on his family doesn’t linger as much as it should, and the trauma he faced as a child falls out of focus quickly. If Hajabi emerges as a fairly two-dimensional character, everyone else in the story barely passes as one-dimensional; in particular, his childhood love interest Shirin (Sogol Faghani) seems to exist only as a sighing, disapproving object for him to pursue, a woman who expresses disgust at this rough-edged man’s reckless actions before submitting to his advances easily and without much conflict.
There’s a hint of Guy Ritchie on occasion to Akin’s direction, which (particularly in the section covering Hajabi’s teen years) uses tricks like freeze frames, slow motion, and montages to tell its often comedic gangster saga. For the most part though, Akin’s direction is polished but generic, giving the film a slick, forgettable look that never elevates what’s onscreen. The most successful stylistic choice is in the selection of hip-hop songs that permeate the soundtrack and add some much-needed verve.
The needle drops do, however underscore the film’s inability to convey what exactly draws Hajabi to rap. His roots in music stem from his father, a renowned composer, and as a child, he received piano training. But the film never really captures his relationship to the art form, and what he needs from it. The title “Rhinegold” comes from “Das Rheingold,” a classic Richard Wagner opera about a mystical gold that can grant immortality; as Hajabi’s father explains to him while watching a rehearsal for the opera early on, “once you have it, you never let it go again.”
This contrived metaphor gets brought back in the film’s final scene, a moment of purposeful absurdity that feels like more of a silly joke than anything particularly revealing. If there’s a core flaw to “Rhinegold,” it’s that you walk out of it knowing a lot about its subject’s biography but almost nothing about who he truly is.
Grade: C
Strand Releasing released “Rhinegold” in theaters July 26.
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