Malcolm wants you to know he’s not a cliché.
He’s a geeky, 90s-obsessed, punk-rocker high school senior with his sights set on Harvard. The fact he is a fatherless black teen coming of age in a rough part of Inglewood is very much beside the point, a stereotype that’s a reality yet irrelevant.
The problem with Malcolm (Shameik Moore) is that his story, director Rick Famuyiwa ‘s”Dope,” is nothing we haven’t seen a few times before – at least not with a cast of relative unknowns.
In another life, this story isn’t a SoCal prepster getting in deep and mixed up with drug dealers, gangsters and hackers. It’s Tommy Cruise dancing to Bob Seger in “Risky Business,” or it’s Jeff Bridges bowling and blazing his way through a case of mistaken identity in “The Big Lebowski.”
Malcolm and his crew of anachronistic friends surely would be familiar with their story’s passing similarities to 1998’s “Half Baked.” But here in 2015, “Dope” decorates its fairly formulaic take on the basic caper plot with social media, memes and even Bitcoin.
It certainly feels fresh and mines some new comedic territory, but it doesn’t change the fact that deep down, “Dope” is a classic fish-out-of-water story dripping with jokes about President Obama, drones and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Malcolm, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) play in what they call a punk band (although their beats and lyrics are decidedly more Pharrell than Clash) and otherwise stay out of trouble, taking the long way home to avoid the Bloods gang and instead getting tangled up with local slinger Dom (rapper A$AP Rocky) and his advances toward local gal Nakia (Zoë Kravitz).
Naturally, Nakia is more taken with Malcolm’s innocent charm and Harvard-hopeful intellect than Dom’s street muscle and swagger, and it leads to Malcolm somehow getting stuck with a couple of bricks of product in his backpack.
What follows is an almost Tarantino-esque travail that sees Malcolm doing what he can to stay alive while Dom’s associates and rivals chase after him and the drugs he’s in possession of, although the violence is punctuated on account of so much of the story leaning toward topical comedy. The transition between the two is unsettling — perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to be, just like violence in the real world. But we’re told that it’s an everyday occurrence in Malcolm’s world, just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It’s a difficult world to follow along as a viewer, which would explain the need for Forest Whitaker serving as narrator for a good portion of the first half of the film before trailing off. Malcolm and his friends are effortlessly endearing, but their own awkwardness around others translates into some awkward, lagging moments after you get past the film’s first act. Plodding conversations aren’t particularly engaging in the way that they were in, say, “Napoleon Dynamite” (assuming you enjoyed the geeky allure of that film).
This level of disconnect with the characters and story despite their geniality certainly is a bit more challenging than your run-of-the-mill mainstream film — being clichéd is not an issue. But finding much originality to appreciate beyond the exceptional soundtrack (featuring the likes of Nas, A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy) and the degree of sophistication with which “Dope” handles its other bits of nostalgia is a tough task.
There are moments where “Dope” stops in its tracks and aims for some ideas and dialogue that transcend its caper formula — poignancy about Malcolm’s comfort level as a black teen excelling in a world where he’s expected to be a far-lesser product of his environment. These are powerful ideas and moments isolated in a story that ramps up its cerebral quotient well after it has dulled the viewer with an anemic plot.
No, “Dope” — just like Malcolm — is difficult to pin down and label, but its complexities don’t add up to coherency. In small doses, it’s entertaining, plaintive and intellectually stimulating, but swallowed as a whole, it’s simply a nice trip.
“Dope” is rated R. Running time: One hour, 55 minutes. Three stars out of five.