Movie Review: Everybody Wants Some!!

From the ‘we didn’t ask for it, but we’ll take it’ department: Everybody Wants Some!!, a “spiritual sequel” to Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Well alright, alright, alright…

(BTW, don’t be put off by the grammatically-frustrating double-exclamation mark in the title. It’s really not that pushy a picture.)

“My Sharona” is the first retro tune we hear in Linklater’s nostalgic, 1980-set feature, and it’s certainly not the last. Like many of its songs, most of which have been drilled into our heads from decades of radio-ubiquity, Everybody Wants Some!! will feel instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever glimpsed the poster for a raucous American college comedy.

(Its own – with one girl to twelve leading men - may inspire an eye-roll.)

And though writer-director Linklater meets those expectations with broad comic set-pieces, Everybody Wants Some!! is mostly a loose, underplayed hangout flick that's happy to poke fun at overly-testosterised jocks.

Sure, it goes nowhere, and not particularly fast either, but when the company is this pleasant, where else would you possibly want to go?

It begins when high school graduate Jake (Blake Jenner) arrives at the ramshackle Texas frat where his fellow college baseball teammates bunk. To list all their character names would turn this review into a parliamentary roll call. The ones you need to know are gasbag charmer Finnegan (Glen Powell), batting gun Glen (Tyler Hoechlin) and the philosophical Willoughby (Wyatt Russell). Plus, eight others.

Over one weekend, they go to a disco, a country bar, a punk show and a theatre party. They drink, get stoned, play table tennis and sing along to “Rappers Delight”. What they barely do is practice baseball. Instead, they give us a tour of ‘80s American pop culture, warmly photographed by DOP Shane F. Kelly.

Shaggy and loose (unlike the characters’ shorts) this hilarious ensemble comedy treats us to ambling conversation and constant one-upmanship among the housemates, in the days before school starts (and, presumably, when their perpetual-partying comes to an end). There are worse groups to hang with.

Linklater, of Boyhood and Before Sunrise as well as School of Rock and Bad News Bears, knows how to extract natural, improvisational-seeming performances from unknown and untrained actors alike. There’s plenty of the former here.

They’re a good-natured gang of gents (Powell and Russell in particular) although it’s a shame that female representation is pretty much in the single digits, if we’re counting speaking roles. The honour of having dialogue to recite goes to Zoey Deutch, a romantic foil for nice-guy Jake. Sadly, she doesn’t get to partake in much of the partying.

As for the boys, it’s too early to know if the next Matthew McConaughey will come from this bunch. We also can’t yet say if Everybody Wants Some!! will give birth to another timeless quote like “alright, alright, alright”, as its “spiritual” predecessor did. (“Spiritual sequel” just means it’s kinda similar to Dazed and Confused, and partly autobiographical for Linklater too. So, don’t expect to see any famous faces from DAC pop up.)

Still, let’s not diminish Everybody Wants Some!!’s achievements, simply because it won’t leave as much of a cultural footprint as Dazed and Confused.

Midway through the film, the always-blazed Willoughby ruminates on the way Pink Floyd “finds the tangents inside the framework”. We should offer the same compliment to Linklater, who uses a classic American genre to tell a tired story in a new, hugely entertaining way.

4/5

In cinemas now. Rated MA15+ for strong coarse language, sex and drug use.