DOPE - The Film

High-school senior Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his friends Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) bond over ’90s hip-hop culture, their studies and playing music in their own punk band. A chance encounter with a drug dealer named Dom lands Malcolm and company at the dealer’s nightclub birthday party; when the scene turns violent, they flee — with the Ecstasy that Dom secretly hid in Malcolm’s backpack. A wild adventure ensues as the youths try to evade armed thugs who want the stash.

Dope opens by showing the dictionary-style definitions of the movie’s title—essentially drugs, dumbass, and cool. But the real keyword for Rick Famuyiwa’s breakout Sundance comedy is on the posters: “It’s hard out here for a geek.” Geek—that’s how the hero, Malcolm, is labeled by himself and the people around him. Which might prompt some skepticism. Are we still making movies about jocks vs. nerds? Didn’t dissing geeks go out in 1985? I remember arriving at high school a certified geek and being surprised that the coming-of-age movies I’d seen had greatly exaggerated the teenage caste system—no one was stuffing anyone in lockers for knowing the order of operations.

A few minutes into Dope, though, and you realize that the rules are slightly different for this particular entry into the high-school movies tradition. Yes, like so many other films, it’s about uncool kids falling in with the cool kids and then having their values tested. Yes, Malcolm and his best friends Diggy and Jib worry about bullies, prom dates, and getting into college. At first, it might seem like the movie’s novelty is merely because of racial transposition—maybe it’s a black Breakfast Club, where the geeks’ geekdom mostly comes from their love of ‘90s hip hop and “white shit.”

But the locker-lined hallways depicted in the film are fundamentally different from the ones populating John Hughes films, Superbad, and Mean Girls, less because of the color shift than because of what this particular color shift means in the real world. Being a geek here isn’t just about being obsessed with unpopular stuff; it’s about opting out from cultural expectations as a way to try and survive. Early in the film, it’s established that in the low-income neighborhood of “the Bottoms” in Inglewood, the drug trade is an inescapable part of the social scene, and anyone can be killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn’t presented as a big, dramatic stakes-raiser, but rather as a simple fact, as it is for so many Americans. And as with so many simple, horrible facts, it becomes a source of grim humor. A student gets shot during a robbery at a burger shack, and the real tragedy, the narrator says, is that he was seconds away from defeating a level on his Game Boy.