Shameik Moore stars as Malcolm, a geeky high school senior with Harvard aspirations living in "The Bottoms", one of the toughest neighborhoods in Inglewood, California. When he's not trying to avoid crossing the paths of troublemakers, he's spending time with his best friends Diggy and Jib playing in their pop-punk band, or diving head first into 1990s hip-hop, including sporting the high-top fade hair style and colorful fashion of the "Yo! MTV Raps" era. One day, Malcolm runs into one of those troublemakers he typically avoids, a drug dealer named Dom, and ends up trying to play matchmaker between him and a local beauty that Malcolm himself has a thing for, Nakia. Nakia's one condition for seeing Dom results in Malcolm and friends being invited to Dom's birthday bash at a local club. A botched drug deal leads Dom to stash his supply of MDMA (aka, molly, aka, ecstasy) in Malcolm's backpack, which some murderous gangsters want back. Malcolm is told by an incarcerated Dom that he can, under no circumstances, give it to them, leaving his life in jeopardy until he can find a safe way to appease all of the interested parties involved.