These days, while stuck at home under Covid-19 quarantine, we spend our time scrolling through streaming services looking for something to keep us motivated. So it’s a good thing that Tayarisha Poe‘s directorial debut, “Selah and the Spades” hits Amazon Prime April 17th, and has motivational scenes in spades. Selah (Lovie Simone) is the heroine of this rite-of-passage movie, and thanks to Poe’s astonishing grasp of contemporary high school politics, a reminder that students aren’t cogs in their school’s machine. Students are cogs in their social cliques. Now more than ever, high schoolers have to pretend to be somebody else to fit in. Thankfully Poe has learned her lesson. Her adrenaline rush of a movie is a celebration of individuality from a singular voice.
READ MORE: ‘Selah And The Spades’ Trailer: Amazon’s New Drama Proves Power Is One Hell Of A High
At first, this story about a high school girl — a sassy, overly confident druggie — may feel like the last thing audiences need to sit through during a quarantine. Parents have their own kids to put up with, but that feeling of motivation, not to mention fun, creeps in once you get on its wavelength. Students at Haldwell aren’t your everyday students. They are divided into cliques, and treat their fractions like the “Game of Phones” version of “Game of Thrones.” War is on the schedule. Texting is mandatory participation. Gossip is on the agenda. And actual classes? One of Poe’s idiosyncratic ideas is to erase the genre’s classroom scenes, which is a clever way of saying, “students are more focused on figuring out friendships than algorithms.”
She’s not wrong. In spending more time with Selah outside of class, there’s more time for audiences to understand her mindset. When the camera rests — it’s usually jumping from place to place with the students — on Selah, investigating the way she puts on a mask to fit in, her irrational decisions make sense. In charge of a group called Spades, which sells cocaine and acid to the student body, she is always under pressure. Like a basketball player who has the ball in their hands when the clock’s winding down, Selah is in charge of scoring when it counts; albeit scoring drugs. Since everyone at this boarding school is high all the time, her gang is usually busy.
There’s plenty of laughs to be had in these early scenes, and it’s clear Poe is pulling from her own experience at boarding schools. “It took me until I graduated college to realize how different my high school experience was,” she told interviewers at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. “Different” is an understatement. Although this hits all the narrative beats of high school films, building to the usual “I got to grow up” catharsis, the way it’s done here is a drug-induced trip down memory lane. Complete with fuzzy lenses, neon-hued party sequences and kids running through the woods in a haze of youthful abandon. It’s trippy stuff, choreographed well enough to catch us in the daze of its second-hand-smoke.
Through Selah’s coming of age, she meets a new girl named Paloma (Celeste O’ Connor) who teaches her that there’s more to life than getting high. There’s a world of possibility outside Haldwell’s gates. But her insecurities keep her from seeing what she can do and who she can hurt. “When you’re 17, you have to grab control whenever you can,” Selah says in one of her fourth-wall-breaking closeups. To that end, Selah gets a little annoying. By pushing away her bestie (“Moonlight‘s” Jharrel Jerome) because he gets a girlfriend, as well starting problems with the theater clique, her controlling attitude gets on everyone’s nerves, including our own.
Yet, for all of Selah’s problems, her eventual objecting to objectification will inspire not only kids her age, but also adults who find themselves conforming to an image society would have them believe is “normal.” It’s in the film’s second semester that Poe’s script tackles independence. Emphasizing Selah’s discovery that cliques are kinda dumb and that her actions have consequences, “Selah and the Spades” loses momentum, despite a witty framing device that places characters as tiny figures in the school’s vast, empty rooms. Twenty years from now people might look back to this as 2020’s most accurate depiction of teenage problems. Taken on its own terms, however, it gets by with a C+.
