I remember when I was growing up I heard a lot of talk about To Kill a Mockingbird. I heard that it was this Important Work of Literature, that it had a Important Message everyone needed to hear. And so I avoided it for a good long time. Because really there’s nothing less appealing than an Important Message.

But eventually I did get around to reading it. And I loved it. Because in addition to being an Important Work of Literature, with a Message everyone needs to hear, it turned out that To Kill a Mockingbird was also a really good story.

That’s sort of how I feel about Dope. It does have a Message, and it is arguably an Important Film, but that’s not why I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because it was a good story.

Dope is the story of a young man named Malcolm. Malcolm is black, underprivileged, and his school is full of teachers and students that don’t really want to be there. But Malcolm is a geek, a good student, an aficionado of 90’s hip hop music, and other White People Sh*t. He and his geek friends don’t fit in anywhere, but at least they have each other and their “punk” band to keep themselves occupied.

But when Malcolm and his misfit friends get invited to a drug dealer’s birthday party, they inadvertently stumble into a situation for which they seem woefully unprepared. Except it turns out their special brand of nerdiness might just be the perfect match for the strange predicament they’ve fallen into.

Dope isn’t a subtle film. At the beginning of the movie you see the widely varied definitions of the word “dope,” and if you don’t get the point there, you see that people are far more complex than first impressions might make you think. And then someone says to Malcolm: “You’re a complicated person.” And then Malcolm looks directly into the camera and basically says, “Hey people are really complicated and stuff.”

It’s the kind of thing many audiences might find off-putting, but for me those moments never crossed the line into insulting my intelligence.

There’s this moment near the beginning of the film when Malcolm runs into a bully from his school who also happens to be a drug dealer. At first their interaction starts out hostile, but it quickly evolves into a short debate about the merits of 90’s hip hop in which the bully makes some really insightful arguments against Malcolm’s genre of choice. And then we find out that this guy has only stopped Malcolm because he wants him to go across the street and ask a girl to come to the drug dealer’s birthday party.

There’s just something so fascinating to me about this character, this guy who’s in a position of relative status and power, but is still just a kid, still afraid of rejection, just trying to make his way in the crapsack world he’s stuck in.

And later Malcolm encounters this guy again, after Malcolm has essentially become an internet drug kingpin, and we see those roles reversed; the drug dealer tries to steal Malcolm’s bag of cash from the drug sale, and Malcolm threatens him with a gun. He’s still Malcolm, still uncertain and timid, but we can’t quite be certain that he won’t pull the trigger.

Those two scenes, for me, define the heart of what this movie is trying to say, that people are complicated, and that sometimes even the best choices can lead to terrible places.

That’s the Message. But that’s not why you should see Dope. You should see Dope for the fun soundtrack, manic editing, and incredible performances by a mostly unknown cast. You should see Dope because it is a good, fun movie. And if you should happen to learn something along the way, that’ll be good too.





Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw .

To hear more of our thoughts on Dope check out Episode 182 of the Human Echoes Podcast.