Selah and the Spades, like many films and television shows about high school, is both authentic and theatrical. Think “Riverdale,” Brick and “Pretty Little Liars,” all sensationalized yet somehow true to teenage emotion in all of its raw intensity. Wrapped up in the high drama of every drug deal and gang fight and expulsion, there’s a genuine anxiety about getting older, a feeling that one small decision or adjustment might put the future you imagine for yourself at stake.
In this case, we experience such apprehensions through Selah (“Greenleaf”’s Lovie Simone), co-leader with Maxxie (Moonlight’s Jharrel Jerome) of the Spades, a faction of Haldwell School’s student body that sells illicit substances like booze and pills to their fun-oriented peers. Selah, a senior in her spring semester, must find the right person to continue the Spades’ tradition of supplying adolescent parties and selects, with the help of her supposedly never-faltering instincts, new student and photographer Paloma (newcomer Celeste O’Connor), whose eye for elegant composition fits nicely with Selah’s full-bloom narcissism. As Maxxie starts to get careless and Paloma begins to get a little big for her culottes, Selah—who dreads the idea of exiting her high-school domain for the uncertainties of college—must decide where her allegiances lie and who must endure the ramifications of their errors (through ostracization, beatdowns or worse).
While its clique-based conflicts and popular kid antics are undoubtedly familiar, there are a couple of key elements that set Selah and the Spades apart from other teenage-centric media. For one thing, the three main actors and several others are young people of color, a gesture that’s especially powerful for a private school milieu that’s traditionally been reserved for a white majority. This ties directly to director Tayarisha Poe’s own experiences as a young black woman at a boarding school—the point is to not tell the same old stories or recycle characters, even as it draws inspiration from Clueless, The Godfather and Macbeth. The movie doesn’t discuss race directly, but one gets the impression that Selah has boldly selected all-black leadership for her organization, an admirable decision yet—as it becomes clear that Selah has a history of manipulating her collaborators and putting them in danger—an increasingly troubling one.
Selah and the Spades foregrounds its authentic/theatrical split by moving between sunlit, bird-chirp naturalism and neon, pop hyperbole. There’s a purposeful awkwardness to this division, which accurately mirrors the uneasy balance between inebriated party culture and sober student life. This doesn’t keep the film from feeling a little awkward for us, since its pacing is neither as propulsive as an episode of “Riverdale” nor true-to-life as something like Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies. Oddly enough, it calls to mind the emplaced architectural works of artist and filmmaker Heinz Emigholz: We witness interactions that don’t move the plot forward so much as move us among spaces with various geometrical relationships to natural light (gorgeously captured by cinematographer Jomo Fray).
Still, the discomfort of the viewing experience extends beyond intention. Its music, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org and some truly terrible Bon Iver imitators (they’re even worse, somehow, than Francis and the Lights), feels flat and oddly distant. The movie also introduces a number of strands that it neglects to develop. The spirit squad, which the film’s trailer presented as central, only dances once or twice (and not memorably), while characters like Headmaster Benton (a bearded Jesse Williams) and Selah’s mother (Gina Torres) disappear from the narrative without comment. One wishes Selah and the Spades was a pilot for a TV show, where these figures could develop as Selah continues to negotiate relationships and prepare for college. (Prime Video, get on it!)
Our protagonists and the actors portraying them are compelling enough to keep Selah and the Spades afloat, and Poe’s style of direction, which allows room for improvisation, should get plenty of credit for its hypnotic pull. There’s an impressionistic, collaborative freedom here, one thematically connected to the self-negotiation and empowerment at its core. Selah’s looks and monologues addressed to the camera make the connection even more explicit: She and Poe work together to assert ambition and eventually confront both the negative and positive consequences of this assertion. It’s also to the movie’s credit that it refuses to highlight romance in favor of teenage, mixed-gender power dynamics.
“When you’re 17, you’ve got to grab onto that control wherever you can and hold tight for dear life, ‘cause they always try to take it from you, don’t they?” Selah quips, in one direct-to-camera moment. Indeed they do, argues Selah and the Spades, and the film makes it worth our while to consider what happens when that holding tight threatens, with the help of a claustrophobically exclusive school setting, to turn into a chokehold.
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