Paramount Pictures
Director Richard Linklater can’t ever be accused of being lazy, churning out a remarkable number of films over the past twenty-five years but with his critical success, he still resides in a sort of niche for his mostly small, intelligently written, carefully cast, meticulously directed movies. He has gotten some mainstream notice with movies like Dazed & Confused, the Before Sunrise series, and School of Rock, and he made a big splash last year with the fourteen-years-in-the-making Boyhood.
In typical Linklater style, all of these films focus on the characters and the dialog, and his latest entry, Everybody Wants Some!! fits neatly into that niche he’s created for himself. Everybody Wants Some!! is an odd bird of a film because it really doesn’t have a story, or at least not a main through-line. It’s premise is that it’s two days before classes start at a Texas college, and the adventures of the member of the baseball team, vets and newbies, as they move into their house, get to know each other, party, have sex, train and even find romance along the way.
That’s it. There’s nothing earthshaking that happens, nothing blows up, no one even gets into a fight (well, except for the one guy who is just slightly unhinged and goes ballistic at a bar when the bartender doesn’t know how to make a proper Screwdriver). It’s like the Seinfeld of motion pictures — it’s a movie about nothing, yet it’s totally engaging because of the winning, attractive cast, the meticulous production design, and Linklater’s on-point dialog. There are movies out there where a writer attempts to craft dialog for a character they have no connection to and it shows, but Linklater, who did play baseball in college, knows all of his character intimately so what they say is totally authentic, for the character and for the audience.
And it’s not just the dialog, direction and production design that work. Linklater is a master of casting and he’s taken some known and unknown faces, made a lot of them unrecognizable under 80s shags and porn-staches, given each character a distinct personality, and pulled terrific performances out of everyone. Blake Jenner, best known for his stint on Glee, is one of the new guys on the team, Jake, who manages to make his “aw shucks” good guy more than just a caricature as he faces some good-natured hazing from his housemates (including one who constantly tells the pitcher that he hates pitchers) as he falls for the first girl he meets heading into day one of college.
Relative unknowns Juston Street, Wyatt Russell, Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson, and Will Brittain all hold their own with the more seasoned Ryan Guzman (The Boy Next Door), Tyler Hoechlin (MTV’s Teen Wolf), Glen Powell (Scream Queens), Austin Amelio (The Walking Dead) and Zoey Deutch (Beautiful Creatures), and everyone just gels as a group under Linklater’s careful guidance. The performances feel real (even if some of the guys look well beyond their college years) as does the frat house and all of the local watering holes in town from the country-western bar to the disco to the punk club. If you were of that age in 1980, everything from those places to the hair and fashion to the greatest hits of 1980 is totally authentic.
Linklater succeeds the most by never trying to turn on the pathos or create situations that bring the characters to some kind of boiling point to threaten their friendships or their team before a third act apology makes everything right again. The whole story, such as it is, flows completely naturally over the course of the two days almost as if you’ve just watched someone’s old home movies from that time.
Everybody Wants Some!! may not be the biggest, flashiest film of the year, it’s definitely not loaded with special effects (unless you count the 1980 hair and manly short shorts and belly shirts), explosions, superheroes or CGI landscapes, but it is a movie that will grab you and pull you in to its world, leaving you feeling like you’ve spent quality time with these characters and you’re almost sorry to have to let them go as the credits roll. And as the credits roll, be sure to stick around for the incredibly cheesy rap song performed by the cast. It’s a real hoot.
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