SPOILER ALERT: Plot points from “Wicked,” as well as a few from the Broadway show and novel the story is based on, follow.

“If y’all not getting on the broom with me, it’s a wrap! The whole friendship is deaded!”

“Ghosts” actor Danielle Pinnock came home fired up after watching part one of “Wicked,” the big-screen adaptation of the Broadway phenomenon. In an Instagram reel, she focused on the movie’s final scene in which green-skinned witch Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) begs nemesis turned best friend Galinda (Ariana Grande) to escape the mob that’s come to kill her by boarding a flying broom and starting a revolution together. But Galinda can’t make the literal leap, leaving Elphaba to, as she sings, defy gravity and change history alone.

The point Pinnock was making is that sometimes, true friendship means stepping out — or in this case, flying off on faith — with the person you’d do anything for. And if you can’t climb onto that broom, maybe you’re not really friends.

I saw “Wicked” not with a TV star but with three middle-school-aged boys, a louder, sillier affair. But I took the same lesson that Pinnock did, of the kind of people I want riding with me. The Gregory Maguire novel the stage show and movie are based on is nearly 30 years old, but its themes of identity, friendship and power dynamics seem eerily poignant in our troubled political moment. The question of connection and allyship between women of vastly different social demographics, like popular Galinda and outcast Elphaba, seemed especially on point.

I’m aware that the book and the stage musical — and presumably, part two of the film — will change this dynamic. I have had devotees of the original piece, starring Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, come at me saying I need to address the entire canon before I write about it.

But today I’m writing about the movie. And when the lights came up at Harbor East Cinemas, the final image was of the racially maligned heroine flying off alone as her friend literally embraces the people trying to kill her. That hit deeply personally for me as a 53-year-old with both lasting and long-lost friendships, and as a Black American who has often had very different stakes than my non-Black friends.

“Wicked” has always been about otherness, though Maguire recently told PBS that Elphaba’s greenness wasn’t a stand-in for his identity as a gay man, but as an analog “to being human. We are all different. We all don’t quite fit into the peg for which others think we are shaped.” But certainly casting Erivo, a Black woman, as the misunderstood Elphaba purposely gives a different dynamic to her relationship with Galinda.

“Elphaba’s green, and there aren’t green people in general, but she’s being discriminated against,” said Tiffany Lanier, a friend from Florida who has seen the stage version five times since high school. After seeing the film, Lanier, a 36-year-old Black woman, sees the story a whole new way.

“You can feel that her being [played by] a Black woman, I can totally understand where it’s coming from. If she were not green, she’d just be a Black woman,” she said. “Her relationship with Galinda starts as performative allyship, but along the way, it becomes a real friendship.”

“Wicked,” based on L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” series and the incomparable 1939 Technicolor version with Judy Garland, follows its protagonists through their first year at Oz’s Shiz University. They start as enemies, become roommates, evolve into best friends and, ultimately, turn into the legendary Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good.

At the end of the first half, the two have discovered the mysterious Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) wants to use Elphaba’s powers to conquer the recently victimized animals, who have been forced into second-class citizenship. When Elphaba refuses to be used that way, her magical mentor Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) and the Wizard set Oz against her.

So when Galinda sharply asks, “Why can’t you stay calm for once instead of flying off the handle?,” she’s seemingly dismissing a real threat to her friend. Because Galinda hasn’t been discriminated against in the same way, she can’t relate and acquiesces to power, which can be depressingly familiar.

“Galinda is doing what she’s feels, what she’s always done, saying, ‘If you just follow the rules as they are, you get what you want and what you deserve,” Lanier said. “But Elphaba’s like, ‘Girl, if I don’t get on this broom and go, they’re going to try to harm me.’”

Regina Verow, 53, of Crofton, a fan of the stage musical, said that as she watched the film, she had to admit she probably wouldn’t have gotten on the broom when she was young. “I grew up in Maine, where there were a total of three Black kids in school. That kind of allyship would have been completely foreign to me. I grew up in a place where I was expected to be nice and good.”

Now, as the mother of two LGBTQ+ kids, Verow has been personally and passionately affected by what marginalized communities face and need.

“Now I’m more like Elphaba, I hope,” she said. “Because she’s now played by a Black actress, you see it [the story] through the lens of racism, in the same way white people say, ‘If you don’t break the law, you won’t have interactions with the police.’”

Again, I understand that things may change between Elphaba and Galinda in the next half of the movie. But Elphaba heading out solitarily and unprotected reminded me of when people have stuck by me until it got uncomfortable or cost them something. That’s played out along racial, religious, class and every other conceivable line.

And I get that every fight is not yours — at least not from the front lines. But for an ally to truly support you, they either need to be on that broom or on the ground helping to direct traffic.