Pandering to Conquer in Dope

The movie Dope begins with introductions from an omniscient narrator, whose exposition on the local color of the rough-hewn neighborhood, in which the ensuing film is to lay its scene, offers anthropological insight into the area. The neighborhood is an archetypal housing slum — the sort of neighborhood to which some newly successful person might allude, after having escaped its throes, when he claims not to have forgotten where he came from; never forgetting the first stages from which everything started. And it is probably for this reason that the high school trio of friends, around which Dope develops, refer to their miserable L.A. quarters as “The Bottoms” — as if to pronounce the human equivalent of a landing strip for people who have fallen between the cracks.

Shameik Moore stars as Malcolm, the protagonist — a high school senior aspiring to Harvard while living with his single mother, a bus driver; who seldom appears at all in the film, and when she does, appears exhausted, like someone preparing to evaporate, and who doesn’t have many lines. Malcolm, having focused his formative years on cultivating a taste for 90s hip-hop, maintains a serious pedigree when it comes to pop culture history. His hair, standing a few inches high above his scalp, is trimmed to a planar flat-top taper, perfecting a glutted 90s aesthetic; all neon-rouged and highlighted in homage to period-nostalgia, conjuring memories of Will Smith as the Fresh Prince — for which he is lampooned by his peers ad infinitum.

Jib (Tony Revolori) and Kiggy (Kiersey Clemons) are friends of Malcolm’s. Kiggy, a lesbian, and never without some version of a hat, is often mistaken — in dress and in mannerism — for a dude; and in an early scene, to a pair of skeptic interlocutors, bares her chest, in a flash of indignation, to prove the fact that she does, really and truly, have breasts.

Malcolm’s life is reshuffled variously, according to cosmic irony, to the most inopportune whims. He inherits — mistakenly, though fortuitously, some might say — a backpack full of misplaced MDMA after a party, and he embarks on a shambling search thereafter, all over L.A., to return to rightful hands the misguided loot, in what eventually becomes a life-or-death inflected attempt at honesty. In the midst of this, when he finds himself late for a college interview, he steals a Mini Cooper, through a sequence of snafus, and arrives on time. Upon arrival, and after quick survey of the alumnus’ decorated office, hints beget dead-giveaways into the identity of the man conducting the interview, and Malcolm realizes that he is speaking directly, after all, with the sought-after kingpin of the missing drugs. But rather than accept Malcolm’s offering of the heretofore lost powder, the interviewer-cum-kingpin urges Malcolm to act as his middleman, to peddle his product for him — explaining to the 12th grader that his future at Harvard hinges on the outcome.

To the extent that mankind chooses his fate — as Malcolm chases after his — it happens that events do go awry. Dope seems to view the forces aimed at deterring Malcolm from his goal, of someday lounging across Harvard’s quadrangles, reading Derrida — i.e., the influence of gangs, guns, drugs, the general appurtenances of long days in the life of denizens at “The Bottoms;” the force of dominant culture, of white people — as sources of vast conspiracy, as active factors converging in a cabal to ruin his chance at life: The chance, single and urgent, to confer good impressions onto necessary bodies at Harvard, and to obtain admission.

This is perhaps the true, unfortunate, submerged, poignant point director Rick Famuyiwa makes with Dope — that an ambitious black kid of no certain privilege who would wish to attend Harvard must exert himself through machinations more aggressively questionable than those his white, privileged counterparts might invoke. Ultimately, Dope manages to reduce Malcolm’s character to a set of affectations, carefully curated, to instances of pandering to conquer.