Dope

Rick Famuyiwa sets the story in The Bottoms, a high crime pocket of Inglewood, California, the same suburb he used for his 1999 debut feature The Wood. He also carries a character over: De’Aundre Bonds plays Stacey again, this time working as a school security guard. The engine is that Malcolm’s cleverness drives both halves of his life at once. The friends enter a science fair to reach the school laboratory, and the selling runs on Bitcoin, so the crime strand and the geek strand form a single line. Forest Whitaker, one of the producers, also speaks the narration, and Rachel Morrison shot the picture. At Sundance it screened in the U.S. Dramatic Competition and Lee Haugen took the Special Jury Award for Excellence in Editing. Open Road and Sony won the festival auction with a minimum guarantee of 7 million dollars, which Deadline called the biggest deal of the festival to that point. It then closed Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and won the audience award at Deauville. It opened fifth with 6.1 million dollars and finished near 18 million worldwide. A good fit if you want one skill shown as an exit and a trap at once. Not for anyone who cannot take drug dealing used as the comic engine.