When Nate was a creative young kid (D.J. Nealy) in Miami, he liked to draw and write, and one day wanted to use his talents to their best advantage, but always recalled the time he saw a local gang trying to intimidate his musician father (André L. Gainey), a saxophonist, by throwing stones at him. Nate threw one at them instead and ended up being chased, dropping his notebook in the process. He escaped, but one kid had picked up the notebook and leafing through it had been impressed; they would grow up to be rappers, but the men behind the scenes would drive a wedge between them...
A low budget production from Florida, Nemesis emerged as one of the brighter films from America's big studio-ridden independent scene of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Although it lacked the polish that a movie with more money to play with would have acheived, with, for instance, the noise of a stadium crowd dubbed over a modest nightclub audience, it made up for it with a strong theme, which was how could a hip hop artist make a name for himself on the modern scene without selling his soul to the money men and image makers?
The answer is a hard lesson to learn for Nate (Sheaun McKinney), who is renamed Nemesis for his act, and he has to pretend to be more gritty and tough than he actually wants to be. Although his father has stuck by him since childhood, the publicity around the Nemesis persona insists that Nate say he was abandoned by him while young, because that's the kind of hard life story the punters want to hear. But worse is to come when the friend who has helped him since they were kids is turned against him.
What happens is that the two unscrupulous Machiavellian types in the background tell Nate's friend Razor (Marlon Taylor, aka Messiah) that the label Nate has been given to nurture new talent has no place for him, and Razor is much affronted. He confronts Nate but doesn't let him put his side, i.e. that he has had nothing to do with this decision, and a feud that would appear to be de rigueur in modern rap is born. Never mind that the two of them would get on fine otherwise, it's all about the publicity, all about the image.
And the sales rise, naturally, with plenty of debate about whether Nemesis is the real deal or not. The pressures of fame start getting to everyone except the people making cash out of the artists, and Nate begins to lose friends and even his manager (Tamara McGill) as he behaves like the gangsta rap cliché he has been studiously trying to avoid. Along the way he picks up an admirer Pearl (Suzie Abromeit) who may not be all she seems, who reminds one of White She Devil from Undercover Brother, but in the main the film is committed to subverting the more hackneyed areas of rap cinema, to impressive effect. There's intelligence in this story, making Nemesis worth seeking out even for those left unconvinced by the trappings and posturings of modern rap.
