‘Dope’ revisits the ’hood, with joy and wit
When Shameik Moore got the part of Malcolm, the soft guy in a tough world at the heart of the film “Dope,” he had a problem.
“Dope” is an answer to, a repudiation of, a reconciliation with the street-wise black cinema of the early 1990s, films such as “Juice,” “Boyz N the Hood,” “Menace II Society” and more. But Moore, who is just 20 and spent much of his youth in Christian schools, hadn’t seen any of those foundational films. So for a week before filming began, he embarked on a crash course guided by Rick Famuyiwa, the writer-director of “Dope.”
What Moore found was context, but not, strictly speaking, inspiration. “I think what Rick did, how he shot it and edited it, makes it similar,” Moore said, “but how we performed is totally opposite.”
That’s because “Dope” is a sort of photo negative of those films, keeping their structure while upending their conventions. Winks to those films are sprinkled throughout “Dope,” but the harshness of that era, and its reliance on gangster narratives, is largely replaced with joy and wit. They’re relatives, but ones kept at arm’s length.
In the early 1990s, the antiheroes were as appealing, if not more so, than the heroes. By contrast, “Dope” takes a character type that was effectively invisible in that time — the black nerd — and imbues it, in John Hughes-like fashion, with glory. It’s a modern-day black coming-of-age tale for an era in which the heroes are more likely to be creative experimenters such as Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Donald Glover than the gangster rappers of decades past.
“There are some gangsters, but it wasn’t shot from the perspective of a gangster,” said Williams, the music and fashion superstar who served as one of the film’s executive producers and also wrote and produced its music. “It homes in on the mentality of someone who’s from there but not of there. And it doesn’t exclude the ’hood; it includes the ’hood. It’s encouraging.”
Much like those early ’90s films, “Dope” was made on a relatively small budget, in the low seven figures. After its premiere at Sundance in January, it became one of the most lauded films of this year’s festival circuit, starting a bidding war among distributors and receiving a standing ovation at Cannes.
Part of its resonance undoubtedly has to do with its revision of a world made familiar thanks to pop-culture engraving. What “Dope” does is reinvigorate the milieu with new characters and perspectives. Malcolm and his two friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori), fetishize 1990s hip-hop; play in a punk band, Awreeoh (pronounced oreo); and try to steer clear of trouble. They are on the bottom of the high-school food chain, largely anonymous except when being muscled by the local hoodlums.
Malcolm aspires to get in to Harvard, and in his quest, an unlikely series of events propels him and his friends into a caper that takes them into the gang and drug underworlds they’ve spent years avoiding.
But all the usual criminal touchstones are upended: They use their school’s science and computer labs for workspace, use the Internet to facilitate distribution primarily to suburban white kids, and the spoils end up largely as bitcoins.
Throughout this, Malcolm never quite becomes a full antihero; rather he, like the film, plays with expectations, shifting attitudes and approaches as the situations warrant.
“Dope” not only recasts the outsider as hero but also peels back the outer layer of the toughguy character to reveal something much more complex. Malcolm finds himself under the thumb of Dom (ASAP Rocky), a drug dealer who between transactions discusses U.S. drone strikes on al-Qaida and is persnickety about words.
“I knew Rocky would subvert so much of what those ’90s ‘O-Dog’ type characters represented,” Famuyiwa said, referring to the antihero of the 1993 drama “Menace II Soci- ety.” He added, “In many ways, Rocky is more Malcolm than Shameik.”
What Famuyiwa — who turns 42 this month and spent his teenage years in Inglewood, Calif., where “Dope” is set — wanted to capture was a sympathy to the circumstances that could lead even a well-intentioned young person down a bad, irreversible path.
“Kids I grew up with who weren’t O-Dog that are still alive, they’re deep into that now, or they’re dead or in prison,” he said. “But in my mind, they were regular kids. I don’t see them the same way everyone else does.”
That speaks to some of the nuance that was lost as films like “Menace” and “Boyz” became phenomena. In the early 1990s, “the most pop thing you could be was a gangster,” said Allen Hughes, who with his brother, Albert Hughes, wrote and directed “Menace II Society,” the bleakest and rowdiest of that era’s movies. “There wasn’t any optimism at all in our film.”
Those movies crested just as Famuyiwa was at film school at the Univer- sity of Southern California, double-majoring in critical studies and film production.
While there was a palpable excitement about the films of the day, “there was definitely skepticism,” Famuyiwa recalled. “There was a lot of discussion about the door being open, but who the door was open to and the stories being told.”
When he left, he wanted to make movies that bridged both parts of his studies, the practical and the critical. He was inspired by those black films that were suddenly in the mainstream, and also films such as Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and “Bottle Rocket,” which Famuyiwa saw when Anderson screened it on campus, and which, like “Dope,” features an unlikely, bumbling criminal partnership.
“It’s only now that I made ‘Dope’ that I feel that those two worlds have come together in an organic way,” he said.
Williams emphasized this broad reading of “Dope,” explaining: “What we were trying to communicate is that there were so many lenses and ways to look at the ghetto and urbanized places. I’m just so happy to be able to use the term ‘the ‘hood’ and the phrase ‘an American film’ in the same context.”