Everybody Wants Some!!

Everybody Wants Some!!  (15)

USA 2016 117 mins Dir: Richard Linklater Cast: Blake Jenner, Zoey Deutch, Tyler Hoechlin, Glen Powell, Temple Baker, Wyatt Russell 

‘It’s about finding out who you are in the space between the notes they’re offering you.’ That line from Richard Linklater’s latest coming-of-age charmer Everybody Wants Some!! encapsulates the film’s spirit in a nutshell: a big-haired, beer-soaked, sex-fuelled and pop-strewn ode to 1980s hedonistic college life, it’s also a movie that finds compassionate nuances between all the bong jokes and rampaging libidos, transforming what could be an empty, leery excursion into frat boy debauchery into something truly honest. In the process it plugs us into the singular wavelength of a group of guys occupying that elusive space between not-quite adolescence and not-quite adulthood, establishing a crucial sense of context that humanises the actions of its characters.

It also utilises what Linklater describes as one of his favourite filmmaking tools: time sculpture. Playing out over three days in the fall of 1980, we begin as freshman Jake (Blake Jenner) arrives at his Texas college (to the sounds of nostalgia staple My Sharona) to begin a baseball scholarship, moving into his frat house with its assorted macho personalities of other freshmen and sophomores, including uber-competitive McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), cowboy country bumpkin Beuter (Will Brittain) and self-appointed leader Finnegan (Glen Powell). There are just three days left before college life redefines these guys forever; the possibilities are endless. It’s almost the anti-Boyhood, the timescale drastically compressed, the attitude far rowdier but the emotional undercurrents no less impactful for all that. 

In other words it’s quintessential Linklater. The famed director has always taken a singularly forthright, clear-eyed look at both the decency and less-than-savoury neuroses of ordinary people, whether it’s the ups and downs of couple Jesse and Celine in the Before trilogy, an impulsively murderous action undertaken by an otherwise nice guy in Bernie or the bumpy growth to adulthood in his masterful, 12-years-in-the-making epic Boyhood. Nevertheless for all its genetic similarities, Everybody Wants Some!! finds Linklater working in a distinctly lighter groove than any of those movies; it’s the equivalent of a hit-strewn pop album coming in the wake of a searing, soul-bearing masterpiece. Even so a single, minor Linklater offering is still crammed with more humour, warmth and wondrously on-point honesty than most other directors manage in their entire careers.

Like his 1993 high school classic Dazed and Confused (to which this shares a spiritual link, according to Linklater himself), it’s almost an anthropological study disguised as a deceptively free-wheeling comedy drama, our bromantic male ensemble often courting disgust and contempt with their pack mentality as they cruise from bar to bar picking up women and boozing to their hearts content. Yet Linklater is never facile enough to apologise for these guys or to tar them all with the same brush: although there’s a strong nostalgic and personal bent to the narrative, Linklater explicitly drawing on his own memories, he never uses them as a rose-tinted crutch.

Indeed after the testosterone-fuelled slam-dunk of the opening 20 minutes, some genuine personalities begin to form almost magically in front of our eyes, some amiable, some competitive but all invisibly joined at the hip in a spirit of male camaraderie. Although the narrative eventually comes to focus on Jake and his sweet, blossoming relationship with English major Beverly (Zoey Deutch), whose chemistry has shades of the idealistic Before Sunrise, it’s the side characters who often sideswipe us, Powell’s rambunctious yet perceptive Finnegan articulating the author’s message of staying true to one’s self without it ever sounding glib. Linklater also has great fun charting both Jake’s personal odyssey and the pop culture of the time through the various wild parties, which veer from gaudy disco to anarchic punk to an extravagantly arty celebration put on by a group of theatre students.

That’s also quintessential Linklater: he’s a filmmaker who is capable of sneaking up and delivering breathtaking yet understated profundity without us ever seeing him coming. It’s just that this time, the morality and humanity is filtered through a haze of booze, a cloud of weed smoke and an effortlessly catchy mixtape of timeless pop hits. Party on!