Gifted mind behind teen flick has bright future

Cast: Lovie Simone, Jharrel Jerome, Celeste O’connor Director: Tayarisha Poe

Duration: 1 h 37 m Streaming: Amazon Prime

One of the upsides of our new streaming- only world of movies is the chance to discover emerging talents, filmmakers whose feature debuts might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

One such shining light is writer- director Tayarisha Poe, whose movie Selah and The Spades marks the arrival of an assured, provocative voice with a richly eccentric vision.

In this teen comedy, Poe reframes an entire cinematic canon of mean- girl cliques, Tracy Flicks and adolescent shticks to come up with a language — and salient points about female authority, autonomy and self-worth — all her own.

With as keen an eye for designing the frame as for casting the characters, Poe shows enormous promise, both as a storyteller and meticulous scene-maker.

We meet the title character as she is holding court at a tony Pennsylvania private school called Haldwell, which is run by a network of “factions,” groups of students who are in charge of underground student life, meaning everything from cheating protocols to stunningly elaborate pranks.

Selah ( Lovie Simone) and her crew are in charge of parties, particularly the illicit substances that fuel them. Selah approaches her mission with the no- nonsense drive of a Fortune 500 CEO. But as a senior, her task is to groom a successor, Paloma (Celeste O’connor).

As pleasing as it is simply to watch Selah and The Spades, it would be an empty exercise without full- blooded characters: As the impossibly demanding Queen Bee, Simone plays Selah’s ruthlessness and vulnerability simultaneously. O’connor — who like Simone delivers a breakout performance — is utterly believable as the Eve Harrington of the piece.

For all its familiar contours, Selah and The Spades feels realistically grounded and surpassingly strange, its slightly surreal atmosphere growing more foreboding as Selah and the school descend into paranoia, competition and jealousy.

Poe may not stick the landing with 100- per- cent success, but along the way she builds a world of imagination, daring and substance. She gives Selah a magnificent soliloquy early in the film, when she describes the impossibly high standards teenage girls are subjected to as a matter of course; although race is never explicitly invoked, it’s woven through the text with gossamer finesse.

The fact Selah’s faction takes its name from an offensive and damaging racist slur, and that Poe never comments on that fact, might be the best proof of all that this is an artist unafraid to take whatever language she’s given and use it to tell her own truth, on her own terms. ΠΠΠ1/2