The films' title refers to Selah (Lovie Simone), a High School Senior attending a prestigious boarding school in Pennsylvania. At this institution, there are five factions, each of which is involved in some sort of shady behavior, like holding parties after curfew. In the case of Selah, her group is known as the Spades and they're the ones in charge of supplying booze and drugs to their fellow students. As her final semester of High School gets underway, Selah begins to befriend younger classmate Paloma Davis (Celeste O'Connor). At first merely a timid photographer who spends her time getting lost in the music on her iPod Shuffle, Paloma quickly becomes the confident right-hand woman to Selah.
That confidence could prove to be a problem given that Selah doesn't like anyone to upset the strict ecosystem of power she's established. Selah is a ruthless individual, but thankfully, this High School mobster movie doesn't go the easy route of just making her Regina George with Michael Corleone's personality. Instead, writer/director Tayarisha Poe opts for something more specifically-realized, particularly in regard to why Selah is so committed to holding onto her level of influence inside her faction. An early scene makes this reasoning explicit as Selah delivers an extended soliloquy regarding why she and her fellow cheerleaders have full control over their outfits, their routines and anything else related to the Spades organization.
Such an explanation revolves around all the control society puts on seventeen-year-old girls and who they are, what they dress like, what they act like. It's all suffocating. Here, at this boarding school, Selah and her classmates are isolated from some of that. They have a chance to take control of their lives and that control is something Selah clings to like there's no tomorrow. Selah can be a ruthless person who does some truly unnerving things throughout the course of Selah and the Spades. However, Poe's writing always ensures that Selah's actions are put into action, however subtly, by that core motivating trait related to control. This consistent feature of Poe's screenplay makes it so that you can see the psychological impetus for Selah's behavior even as you recoil in horror at the cold-hearted actions that she's capable of.
Poe's ability to make these characters so well-rendered has the added benefit of helping Selah and the Spades execute a High School mobster film without dovetailing into grating self-parody. A scene where a teenage snitch is tied up in the school's auditorium is an especially good example of this. The very concept of this sequence makes it sound like something out of a movie whose quality is closer to Lemonade Mouth than The Spectacular Now. The fact that Selah's level of commitment to maintaining her power has been so vividly conveyed up to this point, though, makes the sight of a tied-up blindfolded High Schooler one the viewer can buy into. To boot, Poe pivots the entire sequence around a believable rift between Selah and Paloma.
Constantly rooting Selah and the Spades in such effectively-realized character dynamics makes even the most heightened moments of the production go down smoothly. Tayarisha Poe's direction is a bit more scattershot in terms of overall quality than her screenplay. Most notably, her heavy emphasis on wide-angle shots is well-executed on a technical level but they lack a thematic connection to the characters and plotlines. However, such shots do show a level of admirable ambition that reflects the similarly gusto screenplay as well as the thoroughly committed lead performances of Lovie Simone and Celeste O'Connor. It's not quite the next Brick, but Selah and the Spades does manage to take the concept of a High School mobster movie to some fascinating places.
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