No matter how big its special effects or charismatic its actors, it’s hard to make even a half-way decent movie without a good script. And while writers know that a good script requires structure, foreshadowing, character development, and a host of other important elements, the easiest way to impress and delight an audience is by loading a movie up with fun one-liners and quick quips.
Directed by Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar, The Wood), Dope features 20-year-old newcomer Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a ‘90s hip hop-obsessed geek who hopes to escape from his rough Los Angeles neighborhood and attend Harvard. “All these interviews I’m doing — this is the kind of stuff that I was dreaming about doing when I was younger,” Moore told Yahoo Movies from a hotel in L.A., where he was preparing to go on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Moore belongs to the first social media generation, made up of kids who lied about their ages to join Facebook in the late aughts, when no one younger than a high school freshman could register.
It all kicked off with the riveting, “authorized” tell-all documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, which has not only been called “the most intimate rock doc ever” but which Jack Black personally told us was the best rock doc ever, and we’d trust that guy to school us in rock docs.