School daze

The feature-film debut of writer-director Justin Simien is a charming surprise in several ways.

Dear White People takes a popular but somewhat neglected genre—the comic drama in a collegiate setting—and gives it a lively and engaging set of very contemporary tweaks. The institution in this case is a semi-elite private college called Winchester University, and a varied assortment of African-American undergraduates are the key characters. Racial issues and cross-cultural agitations come into play in this amiably scattered multicharacter tale, which nonchalantly mixes comedy, sociopolitical commentary, romance, satire and the occasional jolt of farce.

Simien’s script is at its most pungent when it’s mixing the dilemmas of identity politics with the college’s inbred traditions of nominal diversity and entrenched hierarchies of race, gender and social class. A frisky, attractive cast helps ensure that these matters, including the intramural divisions among groups of students, never seem merely academic.

Tyler James Williams is especially good as Lionel, the smart kid with the huge Afro, whose indifference to the reigning campus stereotypes makes him the most illuminating and the most imperturbable of the student provocateurs. Tessa Thompson and Teyonah Parris make astute impressions as young women with sharply contrasting attitudes toward the politics of race and gender.

All told, the on-screen results are a little uneven, but there’s zesty entertainment throughout. Some of the allusions and slang in the script seem directed toward an audience that did not include me, but none of that is enough to spoil the larger pleasures of an R-rated film about young people that refuses to pander to immaturity.