'Selah And The Spades' Gives Us The Black Teen Queen We Need To Take Our Minds Off The Rona

essence.com:

Selah and the Spades captures the private school life of teenagers in an age soundtracked by the likes of the Weeknd, who’s known to sing the virtues of molly and lean in his moody music.

This debut from director Tayarisha Poe doesn’t use any Weeknd songs. But its characters run parallel with the pill-popping high schoolers on last year’s Euphoria and the drug-experimenting college kids on Grown-ish.

The bygone days of (unrealistically?) sober students on A Different World or John Hughes’ movies from the ’80s are long gone.

Kids using drugs is such a given that the story of Selah and the Spades doesn’t even rise or fall on this fact. Selah Summers is a senior at the Haldwell School, a fictional Pennsylvania boarding school where she runs