Richard Linklater makes two kinds of films. The first kind—the ones that have made him one of the more highly regarded US-American directors of his generation—are searing dramas that push at the boundaries of what cinema even is. Think of the Before trilogy or Boyhood. The other kind of Linklater films are feel-good comedies, often meandering in their narrative and often mentioned in the same sentences as the word “marijuana.” These include films as diverse as School of Rock and Slacker. With his artistic bona fides assured by the former films, Linklater fans can joyously celebrate this latter group of films as also worthy of appreciation and acclaim without fearing their taste will be called into question.
Everybody Wants Some!! is very much in the second group of Linklater films. It is a coming-of-age comedy, rather plotless and utterly conventional in a number of ways. It does not challenge the nature of the cinematic medium, nor does it ponder the fundamental questions. It even includes scenes of marijuana use, leaping into the epithet of “stoner movie” with both feet. Even acknowledging that it is something of a chortle-worthy lark, Everybody Wants Some!! is worthy of more adoration than it has generally received as a “Sure, it was directed by Linklater, so it’s good, but…” level of film. It is better than that. Specifically, Everybody Wants Some!! captures so perfectly the energy and spirit of a precise moment that most of us experience in the course of life; it’s not the Before films in terms of depth—how many people have actually met the love of their life on a train ride to the airport, after all?—but it still pushes viewers back into their own personal pasts with nostalgia and meaning.
The film follows Jake (Blake Jenner), an incoming college freshman and baseball player, as he arrives on campus in the days prior to the beginning of classes in the fall of 1980. He does random stuff: he meets his teammates and coaches, goes to parties and begins the difficult but exciting task of making friends. In particular, he latches onto Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a drama kid. The final scene in Everybody Wants Some is the first day of class that Jake attends.
On many levels, this is typical Linklater: young people, the sort of meandering, purposeless days that were really only possible before the ubiquity of cell phones, little to no plotting and with characters hoping to float between social groups. A hangout movie. What makes the film more than just a talky, sinuous Linklater hangout effort is the very precise stage of life in which Jake finds himself. Perhaps it is exclusive to the arrived-to-campus-early-for-sports crowd—your reviewer was the very worst player on a not-good Division III college football team for most of two semesters and knows firsthand what it is like to stroll an empty campus—but I doubt it.
There is something extraordinary about coming to campus for the first time, being out of the house and away from parents and adult authority figures, a level of autonomy that few of us experience prior to graduating high school and leaving home. This goes double for the come-early types like Jake, because there are weeks without even the structure of classes to be accountable for. Everybody Wants Some!! captures this ineffable feeling of freedom and unlimited possibility, of adolescence on the very threshold of adulthood, and makes it manifest. That is what the film is really about. It is a coming-of-age story that anyone who ever moved out of her childhood home has lived for herself.
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