By Arturo R. García
What’s supposed to be a romantic moment in Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope ends up being one of its more problematic: we see the protagonist, Malcolm, tell his love interest Nakia, “Don’t sell yourself short” when she explains that, should she get her GED, she plans to attend a community college before, hopefully, moving on to Cal State Fullerton or a school in that system.
Malcolm’s remark is meant to be encouraging, to spur her on to defying expectations. But there’s also a touch of unwitting condescension, of classism in play in that response. And the vexing thing about Dope is that it’s a coming-of-age tale that won’t let him see that other side even as it insists he’s maturing before our eyes.
SPOILERS under the cut
The movie has gotten some shine after scoring at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and the trailer makes it seem like a Feel-Good Hit Of The Summer. What we get instead is a story by writer/director Famuyiwa that wraps Malcolm’s journey to maturation around a social-media heist story, somewhat unevenly. And seeing that Pharrell — who coined the rather-criticized term “New Black” — is listed as an executive producer alongside Sean “Diddy” Combs puts its opening gambit in a different light.
As the film opens, an unseen narrator (producer Forest Whitaker) informs us that Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and buddies Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) are ridiculed at their Inglewood high school because they are geeks for liking “white sh*t” (like Donald Glover, because subtle).
Famuyiwa frames things in such a way that the three friends are seemingly the only grade-smart people in their school at all. Malcolm’s apparent dismissal of public universities stems from his obsession with going to Harvard. In his best moment, he asks both the school and the viewer, “Why do I want to go to Harvard? If I was white would you even be asking that question?” Maybe not. But one gets the sense that he’s not just chasing the education — he’s after the idea of Harvard as a salve; you have to wonder what he would think if, say, nearby USC or UCLA offered him a scholarship.
At the same time, he doesn’t want to talk about where he came from in his application essay, calling it “cliche.” Instead, he pulls out a piece purporting to research the singular “Good Day” from the Ice Cube song. The idea isn’t just gimmicky as hell; as NPR’s Gene Demby points out, is literally a recycled AV Club piece.
Besides being a straight-A student, Malcolm also leads a punk band, Awreoh (pronounced like “Oreo” because subtle) with his friends backing him. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the film had let the music — supplied by Pharrell — do more of the talking, since the lyrics we hear give us more of a sense of his day-to-day than Whitaker can supply in his narration.
At the very least, there’s enough elements already in play to really dig into this take on the Blerd identity and navigating it in this kind of neighborhood — the performances by Moore and company lead you to suggest they could do more; rapper A$AP Rocky offers a promising antagonist as Dom, a local heavy who may or may not realize he wasted his own potential; and the film pops both visually and musically; a dream sequence where Malcolm confronts his friends and enemies on a bus home, set to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is,” stands out in particular.
But instead of maximizing any of these assets, the film sidetracks itself when Dom foists enough MDMA on Malcolm and his buddies to make selling the stash not just palatable in their eyes, but profitable. There’s enough tech-speak thrown around (Tor! Dark web! Bitcoin!) to nearly make you forget that the scheme (and thus, the film’s plot) only begins to play out because the right person talks himself out of settling the issue around 45 minutes into the story.
While this misadventure is meant as a way to put our heroes in danger, what ends up happening is that just about every character besides Malcolm suffers in the name of the plot, undercutting our reasons to root for him despite Moore’s efforts. The women in his life get the worst of it.
We see Malcolm’s mom (Kimberly Elise) for seconds at a time, yet his pop culture and sartorial style — the sources of his Capital-G Geekiness — are both drawn from a videotape sent by his off-screen father; Diggy doesn’t do much of anything besides show men she’s really a woman, tell us she likes other women, and slap a white guy for trying to get away with using the n-word; older women Nakia (Zoe Kravitz) and Lily (Chanel Iman) both express interest in Malcolm (because wish fulfillment), but the former doesn’t get to speak up for her educational choices, and the latter is literally turned into a meme promoting Awreoh after she suffers a drug-induced freak-out.
One might compare this movie to another recent festival darling, last year’s Dear White People. But while that movie questioned its primary characters at every turn, Dope goes all-in on Malcolm and a less-nuanced trial-by-fire. When Moore gets to show Malcolm speaking for himself, you at least want to hear him state his case. But when the conversation getting the most sustained screentime in the movie involves a white guy wanting to use a racist slur, it’s not the neighborhood stifling him — it’s the writing.
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