Like so many of the high-school movies that influenced it, the endlessly entertaining Sundance hit Dope centers on a group of wisecracking misfits trying to navigate their senior year. But Ferris Bueller had it easy compared to Malcolm Adekanbi (Shameik Moore), a black teenager coming of age in an impoverished Inglewood, Calif., neighborhood known as the Bottoms. Malcolm and his best friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori), are self-proclaimed geeks obsessed with ’90s hip-hop culture, as you can tell from Diggy’s baggy crop tops and Malcolm’s impressively towering fade. They go through life with metaphorical “Kick Me” signs taped to their backs. At school they’re harassed by bullies, drug dogs, and cynical guidance counselors, and their routes home are blocked by gangsters making YouTube videos.
Malcolm’s chief concern, at first, is getting into Harvard, which means he’s got to ace his upcoming SATs, write an unusually persuasive personal essay, and dazzle a local alumnus at his college interview. He has a pretty good grasp on things until he and his pals, desperate for one night of coolness before they graduate, accept a party invitation from a mid-level drug dealer.
The three pay dearly for their night of drunken glory. The next day, Malcolm finds that his backpack has been stuffed with a massive quantity of street-grade MDMA and a handgun. When he gets two phone calls giving him conflicting instructions to deal with his unwanted stash, Dope switches gears from high-school hijinks to raucous, often violent action-comedy.
It’s a tricky leap, but writer/director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) sticks the landing. Dope has many virtues and a few flaws, but the quality that bears mention before all others is this: It is relentlessly entertaining. Famuyiwa directs with equal parts sensitivity and swagger as Malcolm and his good-kid pals pinwheel from one strange underworld vignette to the next. Their journey takes them from dark alleys to the dark Web, with hardly any time to catch their breath along the way.
Anchored by Moore’s terrific performance as the soft-spoken Malcolm, Dope is perhaps not always completely coherent, but it’s never less than engaging. From its opening title card explaining the etymology of its namesake, Dope is fast-paced and stylish. Maybe it’s a little too fast-paced at times. It’s stuffed to the gills with subplots and quirky walk-on characters, and there are stretches when it tries to do too much. But after an early summer of mostly bland and listless blockbusters, it feels crabby to fault a movie for being too energetic and having too many ideas.
By the time it cuts to black after its wonderful final shot, Dope has covered a head-spinning amount of territory, both narratively and thematically. But it’s a smart and self-aware addition to the teen-movie canon, so there’s still time for a couple of musical numbers—Malcolm and friends have a punk band called Awreeoh, pronounced “Oreo”—and a seduction scene that’s both funny and astonishingly gross.
In case the name of Malcolm’s band doesn’t make it clear, Dope isn’t exactly subtle in its manipulation of stereotypes. Drug dealers engage in well-informed debates about drone warfare, and Malcolm himself is a walking subversion of racial and societal expectations. In fact, that’s the heart of the film—there’s a constant tension between what everyone expects of Malcolm and what he wants for himself. In many ways, he’s a classic teen-movie protagonist. He wants everything that teenagers want, but with the added pressures of running from murderous drug dealers, securing a golden ticket out of the ghetto, and wrestling with ideas of black authenticity. (Other people’s ideas, it should be noted—Malcolm is precocious and unusually self-assured.)
If I have a real beef with the movie, it’s that shies away from any meaningful interaction with its female characters. For a movie that’s dedicated to subverting stereotypes, Dope is pretty content to embrace them when it comes to women. Diggy, a charming, tomboy-ish lesbian, is mostly treated as one of the guys by the plot and her fellow characters. Then there’s the sexed-up rich girl (Chanel Iman), the buttoned-down good girl (Zoë Kravitz), and the hard-working mom (Kimberly Elise). Dope certainly doesn’t look down on its female players. It just keeps them at a distance.
But that’s not enough to kill Dope’s buzz. Fumayiwa’s ebullient and often-poignant romp proves that the spirit of John Hughes is alive and well, and it’s sporting a mean pair of vintage Jordans.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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