On paper, the protagonist of writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Sundance hit “Dope” is a cliché. “I’m from a poor, crime-filled neighborhood, raised by a single mother, don’t know my dad. Blah, blah,” Malcolm (Shameik Moore) recounts to his college advisor while applying to Harvard.
A ’90s-obsessed hip-hop geek, Malcolm writes his entrance essay on rapper Ice Cube. His advisor would rather him focus on his underprivileged upbringing in Inglewood, Calif., for a shot at an Ivy League acceptance letter, but Malcolm refuses to be reduced to boilerplate.
Along with straight A’s and nearly perfect SAT scores, he has an affinity for playing punk music with his friends; it’s 2015 but he rocks a retro flattop haircut; he listens to cassettes and owns VHS tapes while his peers use Spotify and YouTube. And to top it off, unlike many of his fellow students, Malcolm’s never been arrested.
So when he and his best friends Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) are thrown into the thick of everything they’ve spent their teens avoiding—drug dealers, guns, and cops—they’re understandably inexperienced among the most egregious criminals of Inglewood.
Structurally inspired by rap albums like Ice Cube’s “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted,” which featured “little vignettes and narrative journeys,” “Dope” flows like a tight verse over a tighter beat. It’s an ode not only to ’90s music and its clothing trends but to the millennials still mentally and stylistically shaped by them. The film serves as a look through the eyes of the social media generation into an environment and lifestyle often discussed but rarely portrayed (at least accurately) in today’s Hollywood.
“Each of the characters in the film were familiar in terms of what people were used to seeing,” Famuyiwa says, “but I wanted to cast them in a way that was completely different than your expectations, because I felt like thematically, that’s what the story’s about: the fight between perception and expectation versus the reality of who you are.”
Led by a small-time ensemble—plus big-time supporters Zoë Kravitz, rapper A$AP Rocky, and model-actor Chanel Iman—“Dope” is partially inspired by the rise of the geek in pop culture and guided by the misconception that that specific brand of “cool” isn’t for everyone.
When it came to casting a character grappling with a niche identity, “Malcolm had to embody so many different things,” Famuyiwa explains. “He had to be confident and naive, aware of who he was but wide-eyed and looking to grow; there’s a lot of people who can play one or two of those things, but it took a long time to find an actor who can do them all.”
“Dope” weaves poignant ideas about kids of color growing up today into talks about N-word politics and debates about the golden age of hip-hop. Dealings with online black markets, similar to the now-defunct Silk Road, flow into images of Coachella, EDM, and present-day drug culture. One scene pivots from a deadly drive-by in a fast-food restaurant to the freeze-frame of the deceased’s bloody ’90s-era Nintendo crashing to the floor, illustrating the “real” tragedy of the situation: He’ll never get to beat that level. “He was so close, too,” says the voiceover. It’s a jam-packed whirlwind, never didactic, always rigorously entertaining.
“I was relentless in how I wanted to get [‘Dope’] made,” admits Famuyiwa. “There were studios that suggested if I rewrote it in a way that was more palatable, they would be interested. It was tough to say, ‘No, I’m going to do it independently and do it my way,’ but a big lesson I learned as a director [is] you’re always going to get the blame no matter what, so you might as well make sure whatever you’re doing is what you love.”
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