In Rick Famuyiwa’s urban coming-of-age film Dope, sincere nerd Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his two best friends, 14% African jokester Jib (Tony Revolori) and sharp-witted lesbian Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), make references to all of the following: Rick Ross, Casey Veggies, Yo! MTV Raps, Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day,” BitCoin, Waze, Donald Glover, SnapChat, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, Coachella, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, Mumford and Sons, and viral internet memes, among others. The cumulative effect of Famuyiwa’s commitment to allusion is a general youthful energy, like an adolescent recitation of the bits of pop culture that help make up an identity before real life starts to set in. The fidgety spirit of youth meshes smoothly with the story Famuyiwa’s set out to tell — how Malcolm forges his own identity in a neighborhood where everyone’s imposing their own racially coded perceptions on him — but it devolves into juvenility when it comes to the film’s structure and understanding of character. For a film about the hazards of growing up young, black, and intelligent, Dope still has plenty of growing up to do.
Though Dope is the fourth film from the 42-year-old Famuyiwa, the plot ambles about with the disorganized insecurity of a rookie. Famuyiwa appears to be striving to emulate the laid-back, spontaneous vibe of other Los Angeles sagas such as Pulp Fiction or Friday. But his reckless abandonment of characters and plotlines betrays a lack of confidence and foresight in narrative construction. He approaches several larger theses on race without really engaging any of them, only settling definitively on “black people have no obligation to explain to white people why they can’t say the N word” (solid!) and “always remember to be yourself” (less solid!).
All this is to say that a bunch of stuff happens, but in a grander sense, Malcolm spends the film trying not to get his ass killed. Shootings happen like rainfall in Malcolm’s neighborhood of the Bottoms; in one of the film’s handful of anecdotal digressions, he recalls a school chum’s inadvertent murder while waiting to pick up fast food. In a twist of fate no less random or lethal, Malcolm draws the attention of local drug dealer Dom (A$AP Rocky, a mesmerizing screen presence who could’ve had a shot at a Best Supporting Actor nomination with a less truncated role). After using Malcolm as a messenger boy for fly-as-hell girl-next-door Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), Dom invites him to a party later that night so that he can stash four bricks of MDMA and a hot firearm in Malcolm’s backpack when the five-oh inevitably raids the club. From there, it’s on Malcolm and his buddies to move the product and get themselves out of the line of fire.
Famuyiwa intends their methods of distribution, as well as Malcolm’s overarching transition from In Living Color extra to supreme dope dealer to parts of both, as a refutation of black stereotypes. In increasingly obvious lines of dialogue, characters bust out of the boxes society builds for them. Malcolm capitalizes on the school administration’s perception of him as the harmless straight-A student to use the science lab for cutting and packaging molly. Famuyiwa’s got a fine comic and satirical premise, but his execution lacks sophistication.
Discounting the film’s more glaring missteps (runway model Chanel Iman makes a brief appearance so she can get naked and endure brutal humiliation, and Famuyiwa contrives a spoilery, ludicrous coincidence to tie fraying lines of plot together late in the game), Dope has a lot of fun and brings the audience along. Armed with a killer soundtrack made up of old-gold hip-hop hits and cuts from Malcolm’s punk-rap band Aureoh composed by Pharrell, the film bristles with teenage verve. The comic rapport between Malcolm and his friends has an honest easiness about it, and a tweaky, riotous guest appearance from Workaholics’ Blake Anderson as a suburban dealer is made out of pure punch-lines. (It’s only a matter of time until someone actually brews small-batch artisan 40-ounce malt liquor.) The film’s rascally kineticism very nearly compensates for its underdeveloped ideas.
Cinematic qualifications notwithstanding, Dope’s a marvel of marketing. With its liberal signifiers of youth culture, high-profile cast acquisitions from the hip-hop community, pubescent fixation on ass, and rollicking pace, the film will most likely draw in those social-media-fluent 18-to-24-year-olds it so desperately craves. That’s not a free pass, though. Famuyiwa’s got ambition and raw talent, but a little refinement would work wonders on his approach. A firm editor, for one; it’s baffling that this film took home a prize for editing at Sundance back in January. Famuyiwa’s next feature will hopefully show a little more maturity than Dope, but to this film’s credit, it’s still consistently funny and, to crib Malcolm’s own words, “black as fuck.”