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I'm not sure what to do with this. I think it'll be to focus on directing. If not directing how the plot flows.

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From left, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons and Shameik Moore in "Dope." Credit Credit Rachel Morrison/Open Road Films

A coming-of-age story that is at once a parody of, and a tribute to, '90s-vintage ghetto dramas, "Dope" wears its pop-culture obsessions on its sleeve. So does its hero, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a teenager navigating his senior year of high school in a rough part of Los Angeles. And not only his sleeve: Malcolm's whole look, from his high-top fade to his vintage Air Jordans, expresses a geeky commitment to hip-hop's golden decade, which for him lasted from roughly 1988 until 2001 (that is, from "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" to "The Blueprint.")

This is not just a matter of musical taste. The only legacy Malcolm's unseen father left him was a VHS cassette of a blaxploitation classic. Malcolm's knowledge of movies, television and comic books - with and without African-American themes and pedigrees - is extensive, and he knows a lot of other things, too. He and his two best friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori), are defiant counterstereotypes. They get good grades in school and play in a punk band. Malcolm, with stellar SAT scores, is preparing for his Harvard admissions interview (with an alumnus played by Roger Guenveur Smith) just as the movie's hectic plot gets underway.

Written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa ("Our Family Wedding," "The Wood," "Brown Sugar"), "Dope" has a lot going on, and also a lot going for it. Mr. Famuyiwa has a way of cutting and pasting influences that demonstrates a fan's sincere enthusiasm. He swerves from bouncy jokiness to violence - and from long, talky takes to quick, syncopated edits - with the dexterity of someone who has studied the early work of Quentin Tarantino. He shoves disparate genre elements together as if pulling jigsaw puzzle pieces from a half-dozen different boxes, and if the finished work isn't quite convincing, it's still fun to look at.

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The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "Dope." Credit Credit Rachel Morrison/Open Road Films

Malcolm, who lives with his mother (Kimberly Elise), a bus driver, is bullied in school and harassed on the street by the drug dealers who control the local corners. He, Jib and Diggy respond in the usual way, with cunning, sarcasm and, when those tactics fail, desperate flight. But they are caught up in a caper when Malcolm does a favor for a midlevel gangster named Dom (ASAP Rocky) and accepts an invitation to his birthday party. After an eventful evening, Malcolm ends up with a backpack full of drugs, a handgun and a lot of confusing instructions from various dangerous characters.

Propelled by an expertly selected soundtrack reflective of Malcolm's interests, "Dope" zigs and zags and occasionally spins its wheels. Malcolm is smitten with Nakia (Zoë Kravitz), which makes him Dom's rival. She is charmed by Malcolm's virginal, brainy charisma - Mr. Moore, a master of sly deadpan, is almost too good-looking for the role - and so is Lily (Chanel Iman), the wayward daughter of a drug kingpin. The movie isn't heavily invested in its female characters, sticking to a basic template: There are a good bad girl, a bad bad girl, a buddy and a mom.

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From left, Shameik Moore, Kiersey Clemons and Tony Revolori in "Dope," written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa. Credit Open Road

Otherwise, it's boys in the 'hood all the way, with Blake Anderson (as a hippie hacker) and Quincy Brown (as a rich kid desperately striking outlaw poses) popping up when extra comedy or extra mayhem seems to be in order. Mr. Famuyiwa may be interested in mocking and subverting stereotypes, but he's unwilling to go beyond them entirely, to populate his sunny Southern California mean streets with fully rounded human beings. He also leans too heavily on the audience's presumed prejudices, or maybe on prejudices that some members of the audience will be eager to attribute to somebody else.

Does "Dope" treat Malcolm - an ambitious, intelligent, nonviolent black adolescent - like a freak, or does it depict a world in which he's viewed that way? Does the film engage its precursors (movies like "Boyz N the Hood" and "Menace II Society") as update, pastiche or critique, or as some combination? These are complicated questions, but your answers are likely to determine your response to this amiable, energetic, scrambled movie. It's easy to root for Malcolm, to admire his pluck and share in his enthusiasm. It may be a little harder to buy what he and "Dope" are selling.
"Dope" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). N.W.A. 2 Live Crew.

Dope

Stars

Shameik Moore , Tony Revolori , Kiersey Clemons , Kimberly Elise

Genres

Comedy , Crime , Drama

Movie data powered by IMDb.com

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Review: 'Dope,' a Teenage Comedy, Plays With Stereotypes

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A coming-of-age story that is at once a parody of, and a tribute to, '90s-vintage ghetto dramas, "Dope" wears its pop-culture obsessions on its sleeve. So does its hero, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a teenager navigating his senior year of high school in a rough part of Los Angeles.

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I'll use this to look at the director. what they were trying to achieve. How they achieved what they wanted.

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In Dope, actor Shameik Moore and his nerdy friends adorn themselves in Cross Colours hats and Run-D.M.C. tees, dig through crates for classic rap vinyl and write college admission essays on the importance of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day." But while shooting the buzzed-about movie (in theaters June 19), the 20-year-old actor was bedeviled by an archaic piece of audio equipment. Over and over, he struggled to pop a tape into a vintage Sony WM-F10 Walkman. "It made me feel really young because I didn't know how to work a...," says Moore, trailing off. "What do you call it? A tape player?"
The 'Dope' Soundtrack Is Awesome, Starting With This Hilarious Pharrell-Produced Song
Such is the generational schism in a film that is both a contemporary teen comedy and a love paean to '90s hip-hop. Dope tells the story of Malcolm (played by Moore), a retro-rap-obsessed straight-A student/musician from a rough neighborhood in present-day Los Angeles who gets pulled into a criminal life when he's inadvertently saddled with several kilos of a drug dealer's molly. The film was executive-produced by Pharrell Williams and Sean " Diddy" Combs, and music is inescapable in it. Along with Moore, a singer-rapper who put out the mixtape I Am Da Beat in 2012 and danced in several Soulja Boy videos, Dope features starring roles from A$AP Rocky and Zoe Kravitz (of the rock band Lolawolf). A legion of young rappers, including Vince Staples, Tyga, Kap G and Casey Veggies, make cameos. The score and soundtrack, assembled by Williams and available June 16 on Columbia, is heavy on classic records like Nas' 1994 "The World Is Yours" and A Tribe Called Quest's 1991 "Scenario."

For writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, whose previous offerings include The Wood (1999) and Brown Sugar (2002), the film's infatuation with early-'90s rap was personal. "I'm biased in that I think that's when hip-hop was firing on all cylinders, both commercially and artistically," the 41-year-old says, citing the diversity of acts like Geto Boys, Outkast, The Notorious B.I.G. and Hieroglyphics. "A lot of artists were being signed to major labels and creating interesting and cutting-edge art, but it hadn't gotten so successful that people knew what the formula was."
Kap G Talks 'Dope' & 'Bringing Two Worlds Together' as a Mexican-American Rapper
After debuting in January at the Sundance Film Festival to huge acclaim, Dope set off a bidding war between distributors that ended with a guaranteed $7 million deal from Open Road Films and Sony Pictures. In many ways, the charming coming-of-age comedy traffics in tropes found in mainstream films like American Pie and Superbad: a virginal high school outcast looks for love, bullies rumble toward a richly deserved comeuppance, madcap schemes face unforeseen complications. But when filtered through Los Angeles' Inglewood neighborhood, perils go beyond getting "swirlied" in the locker room by meathead jocks -- Bloods are on one corner, dealers lurk on the next, and college is regarded as an uncommon escape route, not an inevitability. Even though those threats are sometimes portrayed cartoonishly, Dope is a comedy with an undercurrent of sociopolitical awareness that rarely exists in popular teen romps.

"The movie gives a different perspective on the black community," says Moore. The Atlanta native is seated at a booth in a Mexican restaurant in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood in which he has lived for just a week (he's currently shooting Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming hip-hop-inspired Netflix series The Get Down in the Bronx). "The characters aren't going out and shooting people and trying to act hard -- they just want to go to school. They're regular kids. Juice kind of makes you like Tupac more as the thug, but I don't want people to leave Dope liking me for pulling a gun."
A$AP Rocky's 'Dope' Film Sparks Bidding War at Sundance
Rocky -- who landed a supporting role in Dope after helping his then-girlfriend, model Chanel Iman, practice her lines -- does pull guns, however. "It's very cliched: I play a drug dealer, a thug with an elegant, intelligent side," says the rapper, 26. "He's one of those guys that's just a product of his own environment. I can connect to him in so many different ways, being a guy who once had that kind of lifestyle. I gravitated to [ Dope] instantly. It's a hood classic -- we haven't had one of those in decades."

Indeed, Dope's recipe of violence, retro music and fashion, and a sun-baked inner-city Los Angeles landscape makes associations with "hood classics" like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society inevitable -- and intentional: Famuyiwa explains that he used such cinematic references as points of departure. "I wanted to use the common language and history that we have of those movies, but subvert them," he says. "I wanted to use that to put a mirror to our own expectations."

One way Dope does that is by filtering those old inner-city tropes through an extremely of-the-moment, 2015 lens. Drugs are sold through Snapchat, bitcoins and the "Dark Web"; dealers philosophically discuss the ethics of drone warfare; a macho OG laments his social media accounts. At one point, Justin Bieber is described as a "pretty n--a." Moore and his pals, one of whom is a lesbian tomboy, are undeniably Odd Future-esque: They skateboard, wear skinny jeans and play in a rock band named "Awreeoh" (pronounced "Oreo"; Williams wrote the songs they perform in the film). They may seem like outliers in their troubled neighborhood, but they're far from unrecognizable in a mainstream culture where Kanye West, Tyler, The Creator and Williams are stars -- and that was the whole point. "So many kids that we label as 'thugs' and 'criminals' are often those same kids that end up in circumstances that are out of their own control," says Famuyiwa. "They could be your friends."
Stereotype-Busting 'Dope' Moves To Beat Of a New Generation
Even if Dope's familiar faces and pop-culture references resonate with millennial moviegoers, its classic soundtrack may not necessarily reverberate in their headphones -- or at least, not in the way it used to. Songs that were edgy 20 years ago are now rap's golden oldies, the cherished vestiges of an aging generation's youth. "Honestly, it doesn't hit me like, 'Oh, man, that's the joint,' " says Moore of '90s hip-hop. "It hits me like, 'This is where we came from. I should study this, because there's knowledge in it.' "
This story originally appeared in the June 27 issue of Billboard.

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The Inside Story Behind the Making of Hip-Hop Film 'Dope'

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In 'Dope,' actor Shameik Moore and his nerdy friends adorn ­themselves in Cross Colours hats and Run-D.M.C. tees, dig through crates for classic rap vinyl and write ­college admission essays on the importance of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day."

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I don't know how to use this. Probably use it for characters. If not for characters then for plot.

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Dope Movie CLIP - Save You a Dance (2015) - Zoë Kravitz, Shameik Moore Movie HD

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Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Like us on FACEBOOK: http://goo.gl/dHs73 Follow us on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/1ghOWmt Dope Movie CLIP - Save You a Dance (2015) - Zoë Kravitz, Shameik Moore Movie HD A coming of age comedy/drama for the post hip hop generation.

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I'll use this to look at the director. I wanna describe who the director is. I also want to show his purpose.

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YEAR 2014 SECTION U.S. Dramatic Competition COUNTRY U.S.A. RUN TIME 115 minMalcolm is a high school geek with a high-top fade, carefully navigating life in The Bottoms, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Inglewood, California. He and his fellow outcasts share a voracious appreciation for all things '90s hip-hop, opting to sport Cross-Colours and Z.

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I'm not sure how to use this. Maybe I'll go in depth with characters again. Or it'll be for plot development.

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This feature from writer-director Rick Famuyiwa ('The Wood') is headlined by breakout star Shameik Moore and produced by Forest Whitaker.

Three geeks go gangsta in Dope, the vibrant and entertaining fourth feature from writer-director Rick Famuyiwa ( Our Family Wedding). Like his debut feature, The Wood, this film is set in his hometown of Inglewood, Calif., and focuses on three fast friends, here nerdy kids who combine prepping their university applications and SATs with a sideline selling a huge stash of drugs that accidentally ends up in their lap - or rather, their backpack. Like Fruitvale Station, the film was produced by Forest Whitaker (who also cameos as the narrator) and shot by Rachel Morrison, with the latter's dynamic camera work adding energy, color and verve. Bouncy, with snappy dialog to spare and a great young cast headed by breakout star Shameik Moore, this is a crowd-pleaser from start to finish. Unsurprisingly, the film has already sparked something of a bidding war at Sundance.

See more Sundance: Exclusive Photos of Kristen Wiig, Jack Black, Ethan Hawke and More

Malcolm (Moore), with his flat-top haircut, vintage clothes and BMX bike, looks like a runaway from the 1990s, which is exactly how he likes it. Like him, his buddies, the thin-as-a-reed Jib ( Tony Revolori, the bellboy from The Grand Budapest Hotel) and butch lesbian Diggy ( Kiersey Clemons, Transparent) love '90s hip-hop and other "shit white people like," such as " Donald Glover and good grades." Their geek status at school means that the adult staff leaves them alone but they are picked on by the cool kids, who bully Malcolm into handing over his cool sneakers in an early, very kinetic chase scene.

The main plot is set in motion when, after bluffing their way into a party for a local hoodlum, Dom ( A$AP Rocky), they run out of the club as the fete devolves into a gunfight only to discover the next day that Malcolm's backpack is now full of drugs and a gun. From here springs a cascading series of events that keeps piling on one delicious twist after another as the initially clueless kids try to return the drugs to their owner - but confusion arises about whom that might actually be.
More from THR at Sundance:
An interlude at the house of two rich kids (model Chanel Iman and Quincy Brown, the son of the film's co-executive producer, Sean "Diddy" Combs) results in a hilarious set piece that involves driving on molly, a conversation about "lunch" (a code word for drugs) at a hamburger joint that leads to a shoot-out, and a necessary pee break that almost breaks the Internet. The madcap plotting and energy here temporarily turn things into something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon (almost a necessity since otherwise the frequent gun violence would turn this into a much darker movie).

Circumstances later lead the kids to try and sell the drugs themselves, and part of the film's charm - as well as a lot of its humor - is derived from the contrast between the nerdy overachievers who want to leave their neighborhood behind and go to college and the illegal activities they find themselves engaging in. It's not every film that can turn the concept of a slippery slope into a repeatedly used and hilarious punch line, and Famuyiwa's dialogues are often not only funny but also sharp and smart. A notable exception is the way race plays a role in two scenes, the first a discussion of why white people can't use the N-word - which the black characters (including Jib, who claims he's 14 percent African) here use more often than articles and verbs - which is so drawn out (terminating in a weak and literal punch line) that it starts to feel like sermonizing, while the second is the way race factors in to Malcolm's Harvard application essay, which is certainly truthful but lacks any kind of argument around it that would demonstrate his innate intelligence.

See more The Scene at Sundance Film Festival 2015

The decision to also make the protags play in their own music group feels a little too much like a movie conceit (how many real-life geeks have their own bands in high school?), and their songs, written by Pharrell Williams, will no doubt help market the film but don't feel like they could've been written by these three kids, however brainy.

That said, the film's overall energy, which is reinforced by Morrison's dynamic camera and cutting from Lee Haugen, and performances are spunky enough to almost always temporarily suspend disbelief when required. Onscreen in practically every frame, Moore ( Joyful Noise, Incredible Crew), in his first lead role, is clearly the star of the show, shouldering that burden with enviable ease. His Malcolm, the son of a single mother ( Kimberly Elise), is an energetic young man full of contradictions who's believable as a straight-A student who can outsmart gangsters as well as someone who's intimidated by class bullies or any girl with any interest in him, such as Iman's drugged-out sex fiend or the sweet neighborhood girl that Zoë Kravitz imbues with more personality than she must've had on the page. Revolori and Clemons, meanwhile, ace their sidekick roles and are the MVPs of the large supporting cast. Production and especially costume design have a ball working in references to the 1990s.

Production companies: Significant Productions, I Am Other
Cast: Shameik Moore, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons, Kimberly Elise, Keith Stanfield, Blake Anderson, Zoë Kravitz, A$AP Rocky, Chanel Iman
Writer-director: Rick Famuyiwa
Producers: Forest Whitaker, Nina Yang Bongiovi
Executive producers: Michael Y. Chow, Rick Famuyiwa
Co-executive producer: Sean Combs
Director of photography: Rachel Morrison
Production designer: Scott Falconer
Costume designer: Patrik Milani
Editor: Lee Haugen
Music: Pharrell Williams, Germaine Franco
Casting: Kim Coleman
Sales: WME
No rating, 105 minutes

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Three geeks go gangsta in Dope, the vibrant and entertaining fourth feature from writer-director Rick Famuyiwa ( Our Family Wedding). Like his debut feature, The Wood, this film is set in his hometown of Inglewood, Calif., and focuses on three fast friends, here nerdy kids who combine prepping their university applications and SATs with a sideline selling a huge stash of drugs that accidentally ends up in their lap - or rather, their backpack.

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I'll use this to focus on cliches. What things are normal for the neighborhood. How other people act in the neighborhood.

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A geek from Inglewood has to go gangsta in Rick Famuyiwa's 'Dope,' the sleeper hit of this year's Sundance

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I don't know what to use this for. I might focus on plot development. I also might focus on character development.

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Rick Famuyiwa is one of the most profitable voices in African American cinema at the box office with such titles as The Wood ($6M cost, $25M domestic)and Brown Sugar ($8M cost, $27.4M domestic). However, when he went to shop his comedy Dope about a high school senior's zany mission to escape the confines of his Inglewood, CA urban

neighborhood for the Ivy league walls of Harvard - think Martin Scorsese's After Hours meets Clueless but in a different L.A. environ - the major studios, who've lately doted on African American romantic comedies, didn't get it. So Famuyiwa and producers Forest Whitaker and Nina Yang Bongiovi, who were behind 2013 indie hit Fruitvale Station, made Dope their way, outside the studio system. In the end, Famuyiwa got everyone hooked on his feel-good teenage tale. The Sundance premiere yielded a fierce bidding war among Weinstein Co., Fox Searchlight, Focus Features and A24 with Open Road and Sony winning rights in a $7M MG deal and a $15M P&A. Dope is now being passed around on a worldwide buzz tour. It hit the Croisette as the Directors' Fortnight closing title where it received a lively standing ovation on Friday. Dope is also making stops at colleges around the nation, and it will play the Los Angeles Film Festival before opening against Walt Disney Pixar's Inside Out on June 19. "Malcolm, the main character, is definitely a kid modeled on myself," says Famuyiwa who like Malcolm transcended his Inglewood neighborhood aka The Bottoms. "Malcolm's point of view is one of my own, not wanting to be defined or categorized. He was definitely my double on screen." Famuyiwa sat down with Deadline at the Hotel Gary d'Albion bar in Cannes to discuss how Dope was made.

DEADLINE: You shopped this script around to the studios, but they didn't seem to latch on to it. When it comes to African American cinema today with the majors, are they just interested in romantic comedies like Think Like a Man? During the '90s, there were arguably more genres on screen for African American audiences with Spike Lee's canon, Jackson-McHenry productions like Jason's Lyric, and dramas like Boyz in the Hood.

RICK FAMUYIWA: It starts with the idea of Black cinema itself. Part of the problem is that it's thought of as something specific, niche and small. I think Black cinema is thought of in small terms. That's where most of the problems come from. When there's a film that has success, like in the '90s with the crime hood films; when one of them does well, it becomes the replication, or there's a romantic comedy that breaks out, it becomes a singular way of looking at it. (The thinking is that) there can only be one representation at a time - it's like they're reading tea leaves on what Black people want. What should be driving the conversation is: What's the story? What's the movie about? Is it a compelling story? And if it is, then you make it regardless of the color of the people behind or in front of the camera.

DEADLINE: This is such an upbeat, positive film, a wonderful empowerment tale.
FAMUYIWA: These three kids have ambition, it's what drives the movie. That optimism, Malcolm's ambition, is the lense by which the audience connects. Whatever success the film has had, it's because people relate to the honesty of this kid even if they're not from that environment. It's the same way that I connected to The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off even though I wasn't a white kid from suburban Chicago. Back to the first question, people will say that The Breakfast Club is a mainstream movie and try to characterize Dope as niche. But as I connected to those characters in Breakfast Club, so can audiences connect to Dope.

DEADLINE: When did you decide to make this as an independent film? Given how strong the first 10 minutes are, did you ever think of making a featurette to sell the studios on?
FAMUYIWA: When we sent the script out, we felt with Forest Whitaker involved (as producer) and Pharrell Williams doing the music, that at a certain price in the studio system we can make this work. We knew it wasn't going to be a big budget movie. It's the kind of film that would be fiscally responsible. It was surprising at our budget level that no one was willing to take the risk. Maybe we could have done a 10-minute featurette, but it wouldn't be with this cast. Forest and Nina Yang Bongiovi had equity financing they pulled together.

DEADLINE: What was the budget? You've kept the budgets on your movies so low, arguably they've all made profits.
FAMUYIWA: It was low.

DEADLINE: Low seven figures?
FAMUYIWA: Yeah. That's what is so surprising. We were always going to be a low-seven figure movie. Here's a film that could connect with people. It was always surprising that no one would take a bite. We took the bite and took ownership in it. Looking back, I don't know if the movie could be made in (a studio) system; if it would have survived that process.

DEADLINE: Casting the right stars in an indie film is so vital when it comes to financing. There's always the need to have a big name for the poster and the box. Your biggest name in the film is Zoe Kravitz, but she doesn't appear on the poster. Can you discuss why you went largely with fresh faces?
FAMUYIWA: Everyone in this movie are stars in their own right, from A$AP Rocky to Zoe to Quincy Brown; our three young actors are superstars and will be in the future. These are the kids that are making noise in their generation and they're not on Hollywood's radar because so often the culture isn't driven by Q scores anymore. What's cool isn't driven by that. There's a connection that these kids have through social media and their reach through the internet. Shameik Moore did a little TV, but all of them have fervent followings in their own right just like young comedians similar to Kevin Hart years ago. Lots of people knew who Kevin Hart was a decade before he hit it big. These actors are the same way. People are surprised by his success, but there's a 10-year history there.

DEADLINE: Expound on Pharrell's involvement as executive producer.
FAMUYIWA: He wrote the four original songs that the three actors sing in the movie. He was the first person on board before I had a script. I had a treatment for the film's world and for the characters and he latched on to that. We met through WME. We have mutual agents there. When I talked about what I wanted to do next, my agent felt that this was something that Pharrell would respond to because of his background. They got us with Mimi Valdes who runs his company, I Am Other. He responded to the pitch and treatment, which gave me a shot to go out and write it.

DEADLINE: How long did Dope take to shoot?
FAMUYIWA: It was a 25-day shoot, and it was less than a year ago. A year ago, we hadn't even locked in all our financing.

DEADLINE: There was a huge bidding war for the film at Sundance. What made Open Road the right guys to go with? Sometimes it's not about the money, sometimes it's about - do I get to keep my original cut?
FAMUYIWA: Well, first they got it creatively. They seemed to get the movie. In terms of their corporate environment as an innovative company. They felt very much like the movie. They are a scrappy upstart who have a lot to prove and have a chip on their shoulder which is very much in the spirit of the characters and my movie. They were kindred spirits. When talking to Tom Ortenberg, Sophie Cassidy and Peter Lawson about their company, they were going to support it in a very big way. They were going to put their money where their mouth is. We see all these films come out of Sundance and die on the vine and in the theater. Open Road has a big approach that they're bringing to the movie.

DEADLINE: They're going to platform it?
FAMUYIWA: No, they're going wide.

DEADLINE: You're in pre-production on Confirmation, the Anita Hill film for HBO with Kerry Washington in the lead role. What's your approach to the film given the controversy surrounding Hill's scenario during the Clarence Thomas proceedings?
FAMUYIWA: It's about the confirmation hearings themselves. The process. The script by Susanna Grant is fair in representing these people as two human beings caught up in an unnatural situation. Even though what happened between them occurred 10 years earlier, it resurfaced in a public and unflattering way. And so the film deals with basically the two-week confirmation process. It begins with Thurgood Marshall retiring. The film doesn't look back to analyze what he said and she said. It's about the intersection of politics, race, and the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle that put this whole episode in a whole new light. People hadn't thought of gender relations on this scale in the workplace. There were a lot of written and unwritten rules that were still around. What's interesting about the timing of the story now is that we're going to have a serious presidential contender who is a woman.

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How Director Rick Famuyiwa Grew 'Dope' - Cannes Q&A

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Rick Famuyiwa is one of the most profitable voices in African American cinema at the box office with such titles as The Wood ($6M cost, $25M domestic)and Brown Sugar ($8M cost, $27.4M domestic).

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This will be used to look at culture. I want to look at what's going on in 2015. Maybe look at other movies.

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"Dope may know what identities it wants to subvert, but it's not quite sure what identity it wants to have."

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I don't know what to use it for yet. I think i'll look at the characters with this. Go in depth about about who they are.

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is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that tends more to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles than it does to parsing its main characters' self-consciously styled identities. The film establishes the chic nerdism of Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his goofy best friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori), only as a throwback-specifically to '90s hip-hop culture. It rewards the audience's nostalgia for the pop-cultural detritus of that prehistoric era before memes and Bitcoin-a joke about a kid being shot and killed just seconds before "beating Ganon" exists only to flatter Game Boy enthusiasts of yore-without ever understanding the trio's public show of affection as a response to what our culture expects from people of color. The catchy electro whitewash that their garage band strums (the film's music is by executive producer Pharrell Williams) doesn't exactly corroborate their allegiance to the grungy days of Yo! MTV Raps, but then, it's at least consistent with the film's message that "you shouldn't settle for what's expected."

The film's hectic narrative kicks into breezy motion when Malcolm the school genius attempts to broker a hookup between a dealer (A$AP Rocky) and an around the way girl (Zoë Kravitz) who conveniently struggles with her math equations. A shooting at a local club ends with Malcolm running for cover with, oblivious to him, a handgun and bricks of molly stashed in his backpack, and after a run-in with a rival dealer trying to intercept the booty, Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hatch a plan to sell the drugs online using untraceable Bitcoin as currency. Their smarts, as in Malcolm's canny ditching of his iPhone on the bus his mother (Kimberly Elise) operates, become the thrust of the ever-curlicuing narrative. Dope is an Inglewood-set version of Go that seems to pause only when it feels the audience might need a breather, as in a standoff that's winkingly punctuated with a bike stroll scored to Nas's "The World Is Yours" and a dreamy bus ride featuring all of Malcolm's tormentors staring him in the face.

Dope is a drug caper, heist film, and coming-of-age saga wrapped into one, and it feels noticeably constrained by a familiar and forced holding pattern. It's abundant in gags and conversations that, while often smart, our pop culture has already proffered. (The film's funniest bit, in which Jib wishes there was an app that could help him and his friends avoid "these hood traps," soars because it articulates a feeling that's profoundly and uniquely bittersweet.) Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib's reunion with a hacker, Will (Blake Anderson), they met at band camp suggests, in the cock-nitive brio of Anderson's performance, outtakes from an episode of Workaholics. One especially jokey stretch, featuring Chanel Iman as a drug overload's oft-naked daughter and Malcolm's would-be cherry popper, begins as a distracting allusion to the firecracker scene from Boogie Nights before culminating in a trite digression about memes that, as if in kinship to the opening of the ever-churlish Tina Fey's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, delights in transforming poverty and blackness into a punchline.

Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, to be fair, understands Malcolm's nostalgia as a shield against the very chaos that the bricks of drugs in his backpack force on him. But aside from a poignant encounter between Malcolm and a sneaker-stealing bully, in which the former shakily points a gun at the latter and both are reborn to notions of cause and effect, the film mostly articulates Malcolm's struggle to stay true to his meticulously curated sense of self in bits of crudely imparted wisdom. For our convenience, since Malcolm is smart enough to know this already, it's pointed out that he made the "choice to make the delivery," which, of course, leads him down a very "slippery slope." More dubious is Dope 's betrayal of the kid's intelligence, misguidedly buying into the lie of the high school principal who scoffs at Malcolm's planned college essay on Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day." In the end, Famuyiwa tragically suggests, and in contradiction to the twee lip service the film's coda pays to identity, that Malcolm must at least taste menace before his geekiest ambitions can be legitimized.

Cast: Shameik Moore, Kiersey Clemons, Tony Revolori, Zoë Kravitz, A$AP Rocky, Blake Anderson, Keith Stanfield, Rick Fox, Kimberly Elise, Chanel Iman, Quincy Brown, Roger Guenveur Smith, Forest Whitaker Director: Rick Famuyiwa Screenwriter: Rick Famuyiwa Distributor: Open Road Films Running Time: 115 min Rating: R Year: 2015 Buy: Video, Soundtrack

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is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that tends more to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles than it does to parsing its main characters' self-consciously styled identities.

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I'm not sure how to use this. Maybe ill use it to look at family dynamics. There's different family types.

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Skip to Content Want personalized picks that fit your family? Set preferences to see our top age-appropriate picks for your kids. Get age-based picks Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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This article will be used to focus on the plot itself. I want to see how this film relates to modern day. Also, I want to address the societal changes from 2015 to now.

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The article will be used to look at how the different challenges are handled. Drug culture will play a major role in how the character solves his problems. I'll use this look at how the main character is different than everything around him.

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This article will be used to address drug culture. This will help see how gang violence threatens the main character. Also, it'll help see how male masculinity can appear.

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Writer and director Rick Famuyiwa opens his film Dope with a clear homage to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Both films begin with a title card sporting definitions of the film's title. Three definitions unveil:

1. noun: a drug taken illegally for recreational purposes

2. noun: a stupid person

3. slang: excellent. Used as a generalized term of approval

dope

Each definition is relevant as the story careens through drug deals, sick live shows, and a whole bunch of stupid people. This is an awesome story focused around a specific subculture with which I am wholly unfamiliar: inner-city teenage black nerds. As a suburban thirty-something white nerd, it would be wrong for me to proclaim that I understand the plight of the protagonists in this film fully. In light of that, I will instead welcome any amount of insight that I am able to gleam from this fantastic movie, and will analyze it solely on the merits of the plot, theme, and general movie-making prowess. I believe that the themes of Dope are universal, but suspect that they will speak louder to those who can personally relate to the plight of the main characters.

Dope follows the '90s hip-hop geek Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his two equally nerdy friends Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons). The three live in a bad neighborhood in Inglewood, California called "The Bottoms" and routinely have to dodge bike thieves, drug dealers, and even occasional bullets through the course of their days - not to mention the standard torture of high school bullies. They love pop culture, play in their own hip-hop band, and are generally obsessed with getting laid, getting into college, and all the rest of the all-important goals of high school. Their lives are a collection of routines, and Famuyiwa does a superb job of depicting the work flow of their evasive strategies. Bullies trying to take your shoes again? Distract them and run to the on-site cop manning the metal detector. Gang-bangers filming a YouTube video on your normal route home? Guess you'll have to brave the drug-dealing bike thieves one street over.

It is on this occasion that Malcolm runs into Dom, a local dealer. While nervously spouting his opinions on '90s hip-hop, Malcolm impresses Dom to the point that he enlists Malcolm's help in delivering a message to a girl down the street named Nakia (Zoe Kravitz, and yes, she's Lenny's daughter - plus she was Angel in X-Men!). After a bit of a back-and-forth, Malcolm is invited to Dom's birthday party later that evening, and actually manages to get in! While everyone is partying in the front, Dom is exchanging a large sum of cash for powdered "Molly" (MDMA). A rival bursts in to the room firing in an attempt to make away with the drugs and/or cash, and Dom makes a quick decision to stash the drugs (along with a gun and cell phone) in Malcolm's backpack without his knowledge before telling him to run for it.

The fallout resembles a screwball film noir - kind of like The Big Lebowski but with less pure absurdity. First, Malcolm gets a call to deliver the drugs to a red el camino after school. Then, as he is walking up to the car, Dom calls him from jail to warn him that whoever called him first is lying to him, and provides him with an address where he should ask for "AJ". Malcolm, Jib, and Diggy manage to evade the men in the el camino and make it to the address, where they meet Jaleel and his sister Lily, who inform them that their father AJ won't be home until later. Jaleel takes Jib and Diggy out to get some food, and Lily seduces Malcolm but takes advantage of his excitement by taking some of the Molly and subsequently flying off the handle. Eventually, Malcolm meets AJ and is forced to take over Dom's responsibility of selling the drugs.

The three friends are scared shitless at this point, and have no idea how they are going to proceed until Malcolm recalls something he was talking to his mom about at the very beginning of the film: bitcoin! By partnering with a white stoner hacker they met at band camp named Will Sherwood, the crew are able to set up an online store on the darknet to sell their Molly for bitcoin, and they run the operation through the unused science and computer labs at their school!

I am a huge advocate for many of the technologies and software that are used in Dope, and I am actually very impressed with how well they are depicted in the film. Bitcoin, TOR browsers, memes, and the concept of "going viral" are all well-used in this film as plot elements, and the story never gets bogged down with over-explanation. It is a hard balance to maintain, and Dope nails it. A good comparison may be the Jon Favreau flick Chef, which took similar advantage of things like Twitter and Vine to craft a smaller, family-focused story. Dope does similarly but instead focuses on the trials of a group of young black nerds trying to better themselves and escape a rough neighborhood. It is an important and intriguing story to tell, and I am glad that Dope told it so well.

Ultimately, Malcolm uses his smarts to navigate through this ordeal, and capitalizes on others' perception of him to gain the upper hand across multiple interactions. His coming-of-age story offers a unique perspective due to his race, his upbringing and surroundings, and his intellectual and personal pursuits, and despite sharing very little of his background, his story speaks with me. Famuyiwa has put together a wonderful film that should resonate with any audience, but specifically trumpets the plight of a marginalized subculture that rarely gets to tell its stories (especially in the context of Hollywood). Dope champions crucial themes with intelligence, and as Malcolm smiles to the camera in the film's waning moments, we empathize with his jubilation .

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Writer and director Rick Famuyiwa opens his film Dope with a clear homage to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Both films begin with a title card sporting definitions of the film's title. Three definitions unveil: noun: a drug taken illegally for recreational purposes noun: a stupid person slang: excellent.

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I'll use this article to focus on the other supporting actors. I want to see how they effect the main character and the plot. I'm curious if any supporting characters represent something specific.

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A solid & sophisticated Main Character Throughline anchors this smart indie.

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I'm going to use this article to evaluate the main character "Malcolm." I want to see what kind of personality traits he has and how they effect him. I want to focus on him and not just the movie

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Drug dealers or dorks? Hip-hop or punk rock? Harvard or the 'hood?

There's no need to chose sides in "Dope," a comedy-drama that takes pleasure in redefining what it means to be young, black and growing up in a tough part of town.

Set in present-day Inglewood, nerdy high school senior Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his equally nonpopular friends Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) aren't like most of their classmates. They openly discuss their Ivy League aspirations, play in a pop-punk band and have a fixation with 1990s pop culture that manifests itself in unfashionable flattops and baggy TLC-wear.

But when they accidentally cross paths with neighborhood drug dealer Dom (rapper A$AP Rocky), the naive trio is forced to rely on their geek smarts to navigate a world of crime, gangs, profiling cops and corruption. In the process they come to find who they truly are, or at least what they want out of life, and it's of course far more complex than a Tupac song.

Part "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," part "Boyz n the Hood," the film doesn't fit neatly into any particular marketing niche - and that was always director and writer Rick Famuyiwa's intention.

"It's not a 'hood film or romantic comedy or Tyler Perry," says Famuyiwa, 41, the son of Nigerian immigrants who grew up in Inglewood. "It's like there's only two or three things black films can be, and it's none of those."

Not surprisingly, Hollywood didn't get it.

After unsuccessfully shopping his screenplay around various studios, Famuyiwa found backers from the music world, including Pharrell Williams who became executive producer and Sean Combs (a.k.a. Puffy), co-executive producer. "Dope" ended up being made as an independent film with the help of producers Forest Whitaker and Nina Bongiovi, who had just finished producing "Fruitvale Station."

Once "Dope" premiered to enthusiastic audiences at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it was bought for a reported $7 million by Open Road Films and Sony Pictures Worldwide. It arrives in theaters June 19.

It joins a small wave of films, TV and books that are playing with and testing tired notions of race, especially blackness-"Dear White People," "Blackish," "The Sellout," to name a few.

"Dope" co-stars Zoe Kravitz as the gang-tattooed love interest and Rick Fox as a suspiciously smooth banker. L.A. rappers such as Casey Veggies populate the film's large cast. Whitaker narrates "Dope," and Williams composed four songs for Malcolm's band.

"The '90s were a great decade for music, not just hip-hop," says Williams. "The era is defined by many unique voices, it was the perfect soundtrack to represent the spirit of the movie. In creating the songs for Awreeoh [Malcolm's band], I was inspired by the angst of these characters, how they see the world, their dreams and aspirations."

"Dope" is a funny and unpredictable ride through Malcolm's rough neighborhood, known as the Bottoms. His journey is fueled by teen lust, miscommunication and scenarios so absurd they could happen only in his corner of L.A. "Everything that happens in the [film] world seems to happen to white suburban people - alien invasions, house hauntings, whatever," Famuyiwa says with a laugh. "When people see that L.A., they're only seeing the L.A. of Judd Apatow."

The film is also meant to upend preconceptions about coming-of-age films and race - but done with a light touch.

"You might go into 'Dope' feeling you already know what this movie is because, all right, there's kids, they're from Inglewood, oh, it's drugs," says Famuyiwa on the phone from Atlanta, where he's shooting his very different next project, the story of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas for HBO.

"But actually the kid who's the drug dealer is the white kid from Brentwood, and the black kids from the 'hood go to him to get help because he's the expert on [selling] drugs," he says. "I wanted to take everything and subvert your expectations."

The goal of subversion interested Whitaker and Williams from the start. Like Famuyiwa, both self-identify as misfits, and both cut their own unorthodox paths in their respective fields.

"I was a loner," says the Oscar-winning Whitaker ("Last King of Scotland"), referring to his childhood growing up in South LA. "I was really isolated and to myself, almost like a hermit. In that respect I can relate to these characters, and the struggle to feel like they fit inside of a world that maybe seems oblivious to the way their brain or heart is constructed."

Before Williams became involved in "Dope" or launched his indelible song "Happy," he was part of an eclectic music duo called N.E.R.D. Needless to say he also related to Malcolm and his gang.

"We weren't the toughest guys in the world in high school, but we also weren't afraid," said Williams in a statement about the film. "And we felt like being intelligent was not necessarily a negative thing. Rick brilliantly sews that together in DOPE."

Famuyiwa's earlier projects include "The Wood," another coming-of-age story set in Inglewood that he made straight out of USC film school. He also wrote the screenplays for several comedies and dramas geared to African American audiences, such as "Brown Sugar" and "Our Family Wedding."

But after a couple of decades dealing with risk-averse studios and film execs, eventually Famuyiwa was ready to break loose from cinematic conventions.

"I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system," says Famuyiwa, still based in L.A. "But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say. I wanted to rediscover something artistically that I felt I was losing and say things I never really had a chance to say."

Famuyiwa describes "Dope" as "Risky Business" for the social-media generation. Bitcoin, YouTube, iPhone apps, texting, streaming and the dark Web are major players here. Technology is a large part of what sets these kids apart from the Inglewood Famuyiwa grew up in.

"Everyone would assume these kids from Inglewood would form a hip-hop group, but I thought Malcolm would be into so many different [genres] that they would form a band that played everything," he says. "Because of technology, there's no longer the social shaming that goes on if you're a black kid walking into a record store to buy Nirvana.

"Dope's" teens, however, are still teens - obnoxious, annoying, fast-food obsessed and occasionally stupid.

To keep the characters fallible, Famuyiwa had to fight his own instincts. That's because he was writing "Dope" around the time Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman. The way Martin's character was picked apart by the media and in the courtroom affected how Famuyiwa would portray Malcolm and his friends

"There's pressure as a filmmaker to combat that [narrative] and try and show how great these teens are by polishing off all the hard edges," says Famuyiwa, who has a young son. "But I wanted these kids to be as raw and emotional and young and mistake-prone as all kids are, because at the end of the day they are just kids. They have value and potential.

"Sometimes that potential gets nurtured if you live in a place like Brentwood and discouraged and unseen if you live in Inglewood," he says. "But at the end of the day, the lottery of birth shouldn't determine your value to the world."

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The comedy-drama 'Dope' defies 'black film' expectations

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Drug dealers or dorks? Hip-hop or punk rock? Harvard or the 'hood? There's no need to chose sides in "Dope," a comedy-drama that takes pleasure in redefining what it means to be young, black and growing up in a tough part of town.