DOPE B
USA (103 mi) 2015 ‘Scope d: Rick Famuyiwa Official site
This is a film that seems to have gone out of its way to hit
all the touchstones of youth culture, a place where television, pop music, the
Internet, drugs, race, and sex all come together in the teenage world, where
hip-hop is the anthem that blares in the background while kids try to make
their way through the minefield that is high school, complete with an entire
set of distinctly black social obstacles placed in the way. While ostensibly a coming-of-age comedy, the
film delves into a myriad of stigmas and stereotypes about blacks growing up in
gang-infested neighborhoods, where the stomping grounds are a return to the
mean streets of Inglewood, California made famous by John
Singleton’s legendary BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991).
But instead of accentuating the contemptuous distrust between the LA
police department and the South Central LA neighborhoods, coming on the heels
of the Rodney King Incident
that took place in March 1991, RODNEY KING BEATING VIDEO Full
length footage ... YouTube (8:08), this film seems to have evolved from the
Shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012,
where the life of an unarmed 17-year old black teenager wearing a hoodie was unnecessarily
wiped out in an instant, an all-too-familiar headline-grabbing story where guns
in the hands of trigger-happy whites are the growing answer to racial
fears. While LA has been nicknamed the
gang capital of America, home to more than 1350 gangs and 120,000 gang members
nearly a decade ago, Inglewood still has a huge gang problem, with close to 50
different gangs residing within the city, where this film seems motivated to
change the stereotype by creating friendlier, less threatening characters. “Malcolm is a geek.” These are the first words we hear from the
narrator (Forrest Whitaker, one of the film’s producers) about Malcolm (Shameik
Moore), a high school senior looking surprisingly like he’s fresh off a 90’s
black TV sitcom like In Living Color
(1990 – 94), where he might have been one of Theo’s friends from The Cosby Show (1984 – 92), or a
featured character in an early Spike Lee film.
Despite growing up with a bus driving single mom (Kimberly Elise) in a
low-income neighborhood known as “The Bottoms,” Malcolm, a straight A student
with a love for 90’s hip-hop and “white shit,” namely getting good grades and
going to college, hangs out with two other equally bright and geeky friends,
Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), a likeable, light-skinned lesbian that dresses as a
man, whose parents have tried unsuccessfully to “pray the gay away,” and Jib,
Tony Revolori, the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s The
Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), a multiracial oddball who maintains a bit of
his impish personality. Together they play
in a garage band known as Awreoh (whose songs are actually Pharrell
compositions), while cruising the neighborhoods of the streets of LA on their
bikes, often extremely careful about what streets to enter and which ones to
avoid, where the prevalence of guns can make these life altering
decisions. On more than one occasion we
see the results of random street violence, including an unfortunate burger
joint customer that is killed while simply standing in line, literally seconds
away from reaching a supposedly unattainable level on his Game Boy.
At least initially, the idea of presenting material in a new
light feels intriguing, where the intelligence of the characters suggests a
film at least attempting to cut through the stereotypes, where three
definitions of the entitled word “Dope” are provided: an illegal drug, a stupid person, and
something overly cool, each of which at some point or another becomes the focal
point of the film. Perhaps most
interesting is the notion of a black geek being into the same things white
people are into, like good grades, anime comic books, being in a grunge band,
skateboarding, riding bikes, and getting into college, where Malcolm has his
sights set on Harvard, and has already written an essay proposal (A Research Thesis to Discover Ice Cube’s
Good Day) that examines exactly what day Ice Cube was talking about in his
gangsta rap classic Ice
Cube - It Was A Good Day (Explicit) - YouTube (5:12), arguing “If Neil
deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube, this is what it would look
like.” His guidance counselor steers him
away from that idea, suggesting he needs to distinguish himself from the rest
by revealing personal details about his own life, much of which Malcolm feels
is a tired, worn out cliché, another story about a poor black kid from a
single-parent family in Inglewood. In
the process of discovering himself, however, the film rather circuitously touches
on what it means to be black, which has become something of a paradox in the
era of Obama, Trayvon Martin, and the Ferguson police Shooting of Michael Brown, where Obama’s
2008 election was accompanied by a multi-ethnic surge of hope, a promise of a
better tomorrow, ushering in a supposedly post-racial order, but has instead
unleashed a continuing series of violent, racially-tinged incidents that once
more remind us as a nation just how far we have yet to go. In the post 9/11 world, terrorism and Islamic
extremists raise the public’s ire while twice as many deaths on U.S. soil have
been attributed to white supremacists and right-wing, anti-government fanatics,
creating large-scale public misconceptions of what “terrorism” looks like in
the United States. Like derogatory
racial epithets, the word “terrorist” has been spewed as a piece of propaganda
meant to dehumanize dark-skinned Muslim people while the white killers among us
are allowed complex psychological profiles.
Much like that premature elation, this film promises more than it can
deliver, where racial identity is so much more complicated than how it’s
portrayed here, but the director appears to be drawing from the Trey Ellis 1989
essay The
New Black Aesthetic, where “a black individual possesses the ability to
thrive and successfully exist in a white society while simultaneously
maintaining all facets of his or her complex cultural identity.” While that goal is evident at the outset, the
film is eventually bogged down in familiar Hollywood cliché’s, resembling a
black version of RISKY BUSINESS (1983). When
Malcolm accidentally gets pulled into a serious discussion about 90’s hip-hop
with a reputable drug dealer on the street, Dom (A$AP Rocky), what starts out
as a humorous aside becomes an unexpected side trip into nostalgia, where
hip-hop groups like Biggie, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Tupac, and Dr. Dre are
being named with the historical importance of former presidents, where these
are the cultural icons of contemporary black history, yet these are also the
same rap lyrics that started calling women bitches and ho’s while revitalizing the use of the N-word, becoming an expression of
endearment among brothers, but a controversial word when used so conventionally in a breezy and nonchalant fashion. When Dom involves him in a message game with
a sultry girl down the street, Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), inviting him to his
birthday celebration, she quickly becomes the girl of his dreams, helping her
get out of the party safely after a police raid with guns blazing. While indicating “Those other niggas” stepped
right over her to get out of there, Malcolm replies, “Guess I’m not one of
‘those niggas.’”
Only afterwards does Malcolm realize his backpack has been
stuffed with drugs and a gun, where in no time he’s dealing with the criminal
element he’d been avoiding all his life, becoming part of his daily routine
alongside taking SAT exams and interviewing with the visiting Harvard college
representative. While he’s a total
novice in dealing with drug lords, he suddenly finds himself on the speed dials
of rival gang leaders, or perhaps an impersonating FDA agent, receiving mixed
instructions that he somehow needs to sort out.
While Dom insists that he deliver the merchandise to the upscale home of
a business associate, but when he’s not there, he’s instead lured into a
bizarre labyrinth of wrong turns, led by two dysfunctional children, a wannabe
rap producer Jaleel (Quincy Brown) and his half-naked, stoned-out-of-her-mind
little sister Lily, high fashion model Chanel Iman in her film debut, the
object of every teenage boy’s sexual fantasies, who makes quite a lurid
impression before doing the utterly unthinkable, captured, of course, on
YouTube video that streams on all the local news broadcasts. Perilously close to missing his college
interview, Malcolm is even more amazed to discover the Harvard man he’s being
interviewed by is the same man he was supposed to deliver the package to,
turning the interview into a skewed discussion spoken entirely in code on the
merits of Ivy League meritocracy versus the crass, often contemptible conduct
of unfettered capitalism, where exploring his options afterwards is not
easy. Drawing upon the knowledge of a
former friend he met at band camp named Will (Blake Anderson), a white,
all-purpose stoner with an affinity for drug dealing and calling people
“niggas,” a social miscue that is eventually discussed at some length, they
explore the best way to move the merchandise without being detected, using
cyber thriller techniques seen in espionage movies. While this is all in good fun, it’s also
borderline ridiculous, drawing inferences from an early flashback that reveals
the only gift he ever received from his long absent father, a VHS copy of SUPER
FLY (1972), identified as his Dad’s favorite movie, leads the viewer into a
myriad of Blaxploitation references.
Stripped to its barest essential, however, this is actually the story of
a boy who likes a girl, where visions of Nakia are everpresent in his all too
vivid imagination, where he agrees to help her with her schoolwork, hoping it
will lead to more. Both Shameik Moore
(in his first lead appearance) and Zoë Kravitz are excellent, where their
flirtatious dynamic has a sweetly underplayed naturalness about it, like it’s
only just beginning, where both are seen as evolving figures, vulnerable and
compelling, mutually exploring the hazards of the territory needed to cross to
get to that next destination in life, whatever it may be. Part of what works best is the brashness of
the young trio of friends, never underestimating themselves or their futures,
where the film has a different kind of trajectory in exploring the black
experience, vibrantly energetic with a cranked-up musical soundtrack (iTunes
- Music - Dope (Music from the Motion Picture) by ...), even if it does
have a somewhat preachy and by-the-numbers Hollywood ending.
