Imperfect High (Sepia Films, Just Singer Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I stayed up until midnight watching two Lifetime movies, the heavily hyped Imperfect High and another film they slipped in right after it, The Price of Fitting In. It was one of those instances in which, by programming two movies about the same theme – this time, drug abuse among high-school students (particularly female ones being raised by single mothers) – they made each one seem weaker than it otherwise might have. Imperfect High had been strongly promoted on the channel with clips showing two rather buxom Black women with long, straight hair, Deborah Brooks (Sherri Shepherd) and her daughter Hanna (Nia Sioux, top-billed), arguing over the daughter’s escalating drug use. The action kicks in when Deborah announces to Hanna that they will be relocating to Chicago in the middle of Hanna’s junior year in high school so Deborah can take a dream job doing marketing for a large company (it’s indicative of how little modern-day capitalism has to do with actual use values that we’re never told just what it is this company does). Naturally Hanna is resentful that her life is being disrupted by the move – especially by the loss of her old friends (we see two of them, another Black girl and a white one her age, since she regularly calls them and their images pop up on her phone when she does so).

Written by Anne Marie Hess (a name I’m familiar with from previous Lifetime credits) and directed by Siobhan Devine (a name I’d never seen before, though she’s got a quite good eye and does the best she can with the hackneyed material), Imperfect High follows Hanna’s downfall as she joins the new high school’s prestigious arts program and aims at an apprenticeship program with the Art Institute of Chicago based on a comic book (though she insists on calling it a “graphic novel,” which is really a long-form comic book, sometimes with artistic pretensions) about a character she’s invented, a badger named Midge who gets involved in various adventures that educate and empower her. She’s paired reluctantly for a joint project by their teacher with Rob (Anthony Timpano), a cynical young man who rejects a lot of the institutional B.S. he sees around him (he reminded me of me in my high-school days and even more of the kinds of people I gravitated to in high school and junior college), and I hoped that Anne Marie Hess would pair him and Hanna personally as well as artistically. Alas, that’s not to be; instead Hanna falls in with some of the “popular” kids in school, notably Dylan Collins (Gabriel Darko) and his friends Rose (Ali Skovbye) and Blake (Samuel Braun, the cutest guy in a movie that has more than its share of hot studs).

At one point Hanna complains to Rose about the sheer pressure on her and her anxiety over her chances for success, and Rose offers Hanna one of her prescription Xanax pills in a scene Devine and Hess depict much like that snake offering Eve a bite of that apple. By the end of the act Hanna is sleeping all hours, nodding off in class, blowing off Rob’s dates to work on their joint project and sneaking around for more pills, at one point talking her mom into taking her to Rose’s doctor so she can get a prescription for them on her own. (I thought Hess’s script would have been stronger if Hanna had first complained to her mom about her anxiety and mom had taken her to a doctor for a legitimate prescription, which Hanna then started abusing – all too many of today’s drug abusers start out with “legitimate” prescriptions and descend into addiction and ultimately illegal street drugs, like all the pain patients who got prescribed Oxycodone, then found it too expensive to maintain their habits and ended up on heroin because the illegal drug actually turned out to be cheaper than the legal one.) Hanna also sneaks out on her mom to attend “parties” with her new Friends from Hell, including one in which Blake goes into an overdose and the other three just leave him there because they don’t want to be around when their 911 call gets a response from the police and paramedics (he supposedly recovers but his parents come down so hard on him we never see him again for the rest of the episode), and another in which Hanna, previously a virgin, ends up in bed with Dylan and has no idea she’s actually had sex with him until she comes to and finds him next to her in bed.

Eventually she and her “friends” are reduced to buying drugs from street dealers (actually from dealers who show up at the high school and do their transactions surprisingly openly for this era of “zero tolerance”) and grinding up the pills to snort them so they’ll work faster – and of course Hanna goes off the rails, loses her chance at the arts fellowship (though the art teacher, who’s so sympathetic he wears a Guns ’n Roses T-shirt to class, an oddly mixed message for what’s supposed to be an anti-drug movie, tells her she can apply again as a senior the next year), and has her big O.D. and crisis point when she catches Dylan, in nothing but underwear, about to make out (and more) with Rose now that her boyfriend has been sidelined by his own drug consumption. (Dylan explains that he and Rose have a “history” and previously dated.) Despite its imperfections – pardon the pun – Imperfect High really hit home for me, not only because it brought back memories of my own high-school days (though if any of this heavy-duty drug stuff was going on among my fellow students – which, given that my high-school years were 1966 to 1970, it probably was – I was blissfully unaware of it) but because Deborah Brooks reminded me so much of my own mother, at once overwhelmingly affectionate and controlling, generally indulgent but willing to pull the “mom card” at any moment and traumatize me to bend me to her will.

It was a difficult movie for me to watch as a 68-year-old Gay man who lost a partner and a lot of people I really cared about to alcohol and/or drugs – during the movie I told Charles that I throw myself so totally into my obsessions that if I had got into drugs I would have pursued them so intensely I wouldn’t have been long for this world (and Charles accused me of being overdramatic, which was probably correct) – so I found myself a lot more moved by this film than it probably deserved. I was also surprised that Anne Marie Hess didn’t end the movie with the “tag” scene I was expecting – Hanna pulls herself together and wins the art prize as a senior with a graphic novel detailing her struggle with addiction; as it is the ending seems inconclusive, with Hanna at least momentarily clean and sober, and her mom backing off the suffocation, but still facing a wide-open future in which she once again might make the wrong choices, since one of the worst things about addiction is that it’s the gift that keeps on giving. People I’ve known who’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous or one of the other “12-step programs” that have followed its model (which, I’ve heard, works about 25 percent of the time, which is actually better than any other anti-addiction program) have become so obsessed with their status as alcoholics or addicts they talk about it all the time and embrace that as their identity even though they haven’t drunk or used in years. You never quite get that monkey off your back even if you can at least temporarily get him to leave you alone.