Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature, “Selah and the Spades,” is a vibe. It’s a mood, an atmosphere. It’s an allegory, a fable, a play. It’s a deconstruction of a symbol. It’s a smash and grab for the title held by “Heathers”: a postmodern, arch as hell, highly stylized high school clique drama. Like any cool new kid on the block, disrupting the power structure and reaching for the crown is a time-honored tradition, and “Selah and the Spades” does it extremely well.
Poe plunges us into a world carefully shaped by our own familiarity with the high school clique genre. It’s crafted by her screenplay, the dreamy, almost surreal images of cinematographer Jomo Fray, the specifics of production designer Valeria De Felice and the creativity of costume designer Jami Villers. At the elite private boarding school Haldwell, a council of five student cliques (known as “factions”) are in charge, running student life right underneath the noses of the “heads” (Jesse Williams plays the savvy headmaster).
The factions are a longstanding tradition and dynasty, marked by their own culture, lingo and dark history, where teens subvert their own personal powerlessness induced by parental pressure into prep school mob rule. At the center of it all is the regal Selah (Lovie Simone), who can take on high-stakes drug deals like a math quiz without blinking an eye, and politicks her loyal Spades like a loving dictator.
Selah informs the new girl, Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), that here in the world of Haldwell, which is not the real world, you have to be a cog in the machine. But you can choose what kind of cog you want to be. Do you want to be a Spade? Or a Bobby? For Selah, there’s only one right answer.
A sequence in which Paloma photographs Selah and the cheer squad serves as the holistic center of the film, a thesis statement to which we return again and again. It seeds the themes of images, optics, of seeing, being seen and seeing being seen. Canted angles and carefully choreographed movement are rhythmically edited together as Selah breaks the fourth wall, addressing the camera as she addresses her new protege Paloma, pontificating on gender stereotypes and the perils of teenage life.
Poe uses the sequence to interrogate the mean girl cheer stereotype, not through comedy or wit but through abstraction, asserting a black female perspective at the center of the familiar, almost hackneyed teen dream formula. The film’s uneasy, nearly chaotic score by ASKA, which sounds like an orchestra warming up, lends itself to the notion that this is a deconstruction, a dissection, not a rehabilitation of the genre. It would be fascinating to put “Selah and the Spades” in conversation with “Waves” and “Luce,” two 2019 films that also looked at the pressure on black teenagers to have to be twice as good as their white peers.
The story structure of “Selah and the Spades” is far from rigorous, floating on our own genre-based expectations, while shooting for something atmospheric, evocative and symbolic. It’s arresting to behold, but it almost seems to run out of steam at a certain point. But for any of its story flaws, “Selah and the Spades” is so tonally and aesthetically indelible, it announces the arrival of an exciting new cinematic voice in Poe, and cements Lovie Simone as a bona fide movie star.
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‘SELAH AND THE SPADES’
3 stars
Cast: Lovie Simone, Celeste O’Connor, Jharrel Jerome, Jesse Williams, Ana Mulvoy Ten.
Directed by Tayarisha Poe.
Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.
Rated R for teen drug content, and language.
Available Friday on Amazon Prime Video.
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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.