Starring Tessa Thompson and Tyler James Williams. Rating unavailable.

No minority is a monolith. But it takes entertaining mélanges like Dear White People to illustrate just how many different “types” fit into the grab-bag of subcultures at one, mostly white Ivy League university.

The title comes courtesy the not-entirely-sarcastic radio show of one Sam White (Veronica Mars regular Tessa Thompson), whose militancy stems in part from being “only” half black. One of her pet complaints regards the freedom that white folks feel in touching nappy hair around them—something felt literally by Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams), a cerebral young man with by far the largest Afro on campus.

Lionel doesn’t fit in easily with any of the established groups and, through his laconic observations, becomes an effective tour guide to the various preppies, wannabes, nerdlingers, rebels, and (sometimes) outright racists that populate a supposedly postracial America.

The observations are actually those of first-time writer-director Justin Simien, who crams too many good ideas into a small space, occasionally getting in the way of the story. This, after all, is a movie in which a film student will say, of reality TV and sitcom stereotypes, “The vibrancy and complexity of the black community has been distilled and turned into commodities to be bought and sold,” and her secret white boyfriend (Justin Dobies) will answer, “To the detriment of the real thing. Got it.” To be fair, he also reminds the student that her favourite director is Ingmar Bergman, even if she tells everyone it’s Spike Lee—whose breakthrough She’s Gotta Have It this physically resembles at times.

Simien shows great affection for his characters, even at their most odious, pompous, and conflicted. These include Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P Bell), overachieving son of the school’s cynical dean of students (Dennis Haysbert), and Coco Conners (Teyonah Parris, best known as Don Draper’s secretary on Mad Men), a dark-complected woman who sucks up to white frat rats who wear black-face to a campus party—a real phenomenon, as the end credits make clear.

Polemics aside, the script’s biggest kicks often come from throwaway lines, as when Sam clocks a white kid acting ghetto, guessing that he’s probably from rural Ohio. “Vermont, actually,” he answers. “But from the west side!”