Michael Rapaport, an edgy comedian who has graced enough feature films to begin accumulating the aspect of an actor, spoke longingly the other day of his early hitch in the standup racket . . . even as a movie called “Beautiful Girls,” containing his strongest sustained performance to date, surfaced in the theaters.
His is a distinctively lively presence in the ensemble movie, and Rapaport works especially well in scenes shared with Martha Plimpton, a powerful but generally neglected player. Rapaport plays an inattentive but possessive jerk, and Plimpton plays a woman who deserves better.
At only 25, New York-born Rapaport is a veteran of the Los Angeles improv-comedy scene by having made up in intensity what he may lack in experience. He and a pal, Kevin Corrigan, made a striking contribution to the team-comedy tradition by building an act called Rap & Cor into a sustained impression of their most vivid pop-cultural references from childhood. The act lasted 2 1/2 years, and Rapaport speaks of its breakup with a profound sadness.
“It was inevitable we should go separate ways,” he said. “But I was happiest doing that kind of comedy.”
Since the collapse, Rapaport has rallied particularly well, with such big-screen roles as a novice white supremacist in John Singleton’s “Higher Learning” (1995) and a particularly creepy mobster in “Kiss of Death” (1995).
But it is Rapaport’s generation that has transformed into cultural icons the so-called “throwaway” diversions of 1970s Saturday-morning TV cartoons, breakfast-cereal premiums and fast-food giveaway playthings. For Rapaport, the be-all and end-all of that decade’s popular culture has to be the “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?” cartoon program, a Hanna-Barbera concoction about the misadventures of a rambunctious Great Dane and his mostly human sidekicks.
One of Scoob’s main supporting characters is Shaggy, a bearded youth of no discernible ambition. Shaggy has been rediscovered during the last five years as virtually a patron saint of the slacker mentality, and Rapaport had built his most memorable comic routines around this personality.
” `Scooby-Doo’ . . . that’s the inspiration. One of my greatest influences,” Rapaport said. “I grew up doing impressions of Shaggy, and it led me right into this. So I guess you could say that `Scooby-Doo’ is my greatest influence as an actor.”
There remains the prospect of a professional reunion with Corrigan, Rapaport said, but “where it’s all leading right now is that I’m intent on keeping working as an actor.”
