By Sandra Hall
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
MA, 117 minutes, now showing
Director: Richard LinklaterStars: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman, Glen Powell, Austin Amelio
★★★
With his latest film, writer-director Richard Linklater goes back to the stoner comedies that ignited his career 25 years ago. The question is: Do we want to go with him?
The good news is the college jocks who populate Everybody Wants Some!! don't get nearly as spaced out as the high school kids who turned Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) into a cult movie for a generation of audiences needing help to remember the celebratory rituals of their high school graduation.
The main characters in Everybody Wants Some!! do plenty of cruising around and ogling at girls. Credit: Roadshow
This bunch are required to retain control of their motor skills if they're to survive the relentless game-playing that keep boredom at bay in the frat house where freshman Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) has fetched up. He's a baseball player and is billeted with the rest of his new team-mates, which means his life from now on is going to be one long contest.
These boys are seriously into one-upmanship. It's just their beer intake ensures they often forget what it is they're competing about.
It takes a while to sort them out – although a few make an instant impression. The seniors, McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) and Roper (Ryan Guzman), are the tough guys; Finnegan (Glen Powell) is the fast-talker; Jay (Juston Street) is a sociopath, prone to spectacular temper tantrums; and Willoughby (Wyatt Russell) is the habitual pot smoker who would also be a New Ager if the term had yet been invented.
It's 1980, four years on from the events of Dazed and Confused, and Linklater is again re-visiting his youth during the era of moustaches, shaggy haircuts and polyester with everything.
There's no storyline. The script just drifts from one vignette to the next as the boys cruise around, ogling girls, haunting the campus night spots and staging a party while their house does its best to remain standing under their assaults.
Music is essential to their progress. Linklater crams the soundtrack with the hits of the day, covering all genres. In a moment of extreme desperation, the boys even resort to line dancing. And despite – or, perhaps, because of – the perpetual jockeying for position, a sense of camaraderie begins to emerge.
It's a very male movie. Most of the girls have to make do with giggles, groans and orgasmic sighs. Only one girl gets a speaking role. She's the theatre major (Zoe Deutch) who takes to Jake because she likes quiet boys, but romance is thoroughly upstaged by the bromances taking shape all around.
Nostalgia, however, can take you only so far if it doesn't happen to touch your own memories of the way things were. And Linklater really struggles to keep up the film's energy levels. You really had to be there.