Dope: A Harvard Wannabe Gets a Thug Life Education
An early scene in Dope, Rick Famuyiwa’s highly entertaining mess of a movie, perfectly encapsulates the film’s tone. It features its protagonist, a black high school student named Malcolm (Shameik Moore), fleeing with his two best friends from a pair of Los Angeles gangsters. It’s a frenetic scene, with Malcolm and his pals riding pitiful bicycles while the thugs give chase in a roaring red El Camino. Then, as the desperate teenagers pedal across an overpass, the camera suddenly switches to a static wide-shot, revealing that the overpass is labeled, in austere capital letters, “Thurgood Marshall Justice Plaza.” That level of silent wit—the confidence to quietly slip in a reference to America’s first black Supreme Court Justice in the middle of a frenzied chase sequence—is indicative of Dope‘s sly sense of humor, not to mention its hectic, erratic sensibility. This mélange of styles and tropes is far too chaotic to be a great movie, but it’s precisely that sense of unruliness that makes it so much fun.
Dope initially scans as a lively satire of Boyz N the Hood, John Singleton’s seminal coming-of-age story about black youths growing up on hard streets in hard times. Malcolm, the son of a single mother, lives in The Bottoms, a crime-ridden district of Inglewood. His neighborhood is swimming in drugs and beset by gang violence (the red-clad Bloods are especially prominent), and he’s under constant threat of thievery or worse. Yet Malcolm, contrary to expectation, is neither a reprobate nor a victim. He is instead, as Forest Whitaker’s playful opening voiceover informs us, a geek. He dresses like a goofball, he rocks a ludicrous high-top fade, and he and his aforementioned friends, Jib (Tony Revolori, the lobby boy from The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Diggy (Transparent‘s Kiersey Clemons), are utterly obsessed with ’90s hip-hop culture. His top priority is not avoiding jail or scoring drugs—it’s getting into college, which is why he’s penned a singular application essay entitled, “A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s Good Day.” Read More
