‘Dope” hooks you fast and strong.
The coy, over-the-top Sundance hit from writer-director Rick Famuyiwa about a couple of geeks who get entangled in gangster culture is a fresh and slightly rebellious take on the series-of-escalating-events story.
Our hero, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), is a high school senior, his existence curated to a stylist’s perfection. He and his friends Jib (“The Grand Budapest Hotel’s” lobby boy Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) like 1990s hip hop culture, play in a punk band, get good grades and stay out of trouble.
They live in a gritty suburban Los Angeles neighborhood. To survive, they try to do their own thing and avoid the bad eggs. Jib at one point wishes idly that Waze could identify gang-free bike routes home. Their proximity to danger is more a nuisance than anything else — at first.
The label- and aesthetic-obsessed Malcolm wants to go to Harvard and he doesn’t want to rely on clichés, or doing what’s expected to get there. We’re talking about his personal essay only here — Malcolm did do such expected things as, you know, study. He doesn’t, however, want to use his hard-knocks single-parent upbringing to inform his narrative. He’d rather write about Ice Cube’s Good Day.
If it all sounds kind of light, it is at first. But the tone transitions rather violently across the nearly two-hour runtime. One moment, everything is self-referential and glib and sunny; the next, people are actually getting mowed down with gunfire.
It works only in the strong first half — a near real-time portrait of a kid stepping out of his comfort zone into actual trouble.
This section picks up when charismatic dealer Dom (A$AP Rocky) injects himself into Malcolm’s life. Dom makes him play telephone to invite a pretty, serious girl (Zoë Kravitz) to his birthday party at a club. She says she’ll go only if Malcolm goes, too. He does, of course.
After a bit of fun and normal will-they-won’t-they high school drama, the club gets raided. In the chaos, Dom hides his drugs and a gun in Malcolm’s backpack. These aren’t discovered until the next morning at school, after Dom’s been arrested and Malcolm has done the unthinkable: set off the metal detector.
In the vein of Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” or Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” the teens are thrust into a wild world of dealers, thugs, crooks and liars, as they try to figure out how to get rid of the drugs and stay alive.
At this point, what’s expected of Malcolm is exactly what allows him to break bad rather easily. He uses the chemistry lab to sort drugs. The computer lab is for the sales. And the security guard lets him pass every time his drug-sniffing mutt gets antsy and the metal detector goes off.
“Dope” is intoxicatingly cinematic, whether in the vibrancy of the best dance party you’ve ever been to, or an unexpected narrative pause for a dreamy, music-video like interlude.
And yet, enjoyable performances aside, the film goes on far too long and the energy and vibrancy of the first half dwindles into a basic caper tale. Don’t expect big ideas or even satirical commentary here either. “Dope” is just a fantastical, slight, and occasionally fun hip-hop-scored romp.
