DOPE ★★★ 1/2
If Neil deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube, this is what it would look like
Malcolm Adekanbi’s original plan to get into Harvard is an entrance essay that thoroughly investigates which day, exactly, Ice Cube was talking about in his gangsta rap classic “Today Was a Good Day.” It’s not just any old essay about Ice Cube, though, he tells his rather unimpressed guidance counsellor: “If Neil deGrasse Tyson was writing about Ice Cube,” he explains, “this is what it would look like.” That guidance counsellor would rather he talk about being a poor kid from a single-parent family in Inglewood, but Malcolm would rather go down swinging for the fences that sneak through doing the usual “cliché blah blah blah.”
Writer/director Rick Famuyiwa imbues Dope with Malcolm’s restless creativity, though he doesn’t really throw out the clichés of a coming-of-age story so much as tweak, turn and flip them. Malcolm, played with a perfectly restrained verve by newcomer Shameik Moore, is introduced to us with a kind of Wes Anderson-by-way-of-Yo!-MTV-Raps voiceover montage, blistering through his life as a nerd with a retro fetish in The Bottoms, a corner of South Central L.A. that’s tough living even if you do fit in (when Malcolm accidentally carries a bag full of drugs and a gun through the metal detector and past the dog at the front door of his school, the guard just naturally assumes something is broken and waves him on through). He likes ’ 90s hiphop, is a straight-A student, and plays in a punk band called Oreo, a reference to how the rest of the school regards him — black on the outside, white inside — because of his love of all the things white people like (skateboarding, Anime, Donald Glover). His bandmates/best friends are variations on his theme, including wry, rambunctious lesbian Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and sarcastic voice of idleness Jib (Tony Revolori).
Meeting the gang, and exploring the various ways in which they stick out like sore thumbs, is fun enough that it’s a bit of a shame things have to happen, but Famuyiwa infuses the manufactured drama with witty panache. The road is convoluted, but kept interesting because its driven over so rambunctiously.
The gist of it is that Malcolm and the gang end up with a mess of MDMA they want no part of, and through a series of unlikely events end up having to sell it off to impress the crooked Harvard alum interviewing Malcolm for that portion of his entrance exam. Malcolm ends up using his creativity to find a way to offload it on the dark web with the help of a space cadet/computer genius (Blake Anderson), while dodging the dealers who are after it, and running into a woman who is fairly intoxicating in her own right (Zoe Kravitz).
There is a palpable darkness at the edge of the story, but Famuyiwa keeps it at the edges, giving the gang room to play. Dope’s favourite digressions are chatty parsings of language, a clever reflection of the codes Malcolm has to navi- gate as an outsider everywhere he goes. A dealer explains the necessity of violence via warnings of a slippery slope (“Does that have anything to do with skiing?” one of his less eloquent associates asks); the white hacker simply refuses to accept that he can’t use the nword as a term of endearment, though his logic is eventually bit down with a well-timed slap from Diggy; the film even caps itself with a sort of video essay, Malcolm explaining how his identities intersect, with a style vastly more lively than that description would make it seem.
It’s fitting there that the movie and Malcolm effectively become the same, because for some of its shagginess, Dope is more or less a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of its main character. Clever, striving and hard to specifically classify, it’s recognizable (sometimes downright retro) colours swirled together and splattered across the city with passion and force. It’s not always a perfect movie, but it really knows what it feels like to be alive, and there’s a good chance it will push you out the theatre door reverberating with its potent and particular energy. ∂∂∂½
Dope opens in Toronto June 19, with more cities to follow.