The brutal truth is that Richard Linklater has left the Mt. Olympus of “Boyhood” for the punier anthill of “Everybody Wants Some!!” His usual personal masterpieces (“Boyhood,” “Dazed and Confused,” the “Before” trilogy) crawl along, like a perfectly-struck ground ball, at captivating rhythms. But this new personal project abounds in bizarre bad-hops. Something’s fundamentally off — a forced laugh here, a clichéd party scene there, the material never adds up to much beyond a colorful array of surface imagery.
The hero of “Dazed-hood II: Electric Boogaloo” is Jake (Blake Jenner), the new freshman pitcher for the college baseball team. We follow him during his move-in week (an artificially imposed clock counts down the days before class starts) as he navigates the brave new world of college chicks, disco parties and baseball practice. Jake’s team is a pirate’s crew of stereotypes: the bearded hippie with the Potmobile, the sensitive country boy whose sweetie back home is pregnant, the token black guy, and Niles, the weird Matt McConnaughey-ish sidekick who’s more creepy than cool. However, there is one person who breaks the testosterone monotony of Jake’s week: Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a humble theater major with whom Jake falls in love.
“Everbody Wants Some!!” is a personal project with a curiously generic sentimentality towards its past. A Mason Evans-like slummer from some mid-Texas jerkwater berg, Jake is a nobody freshman trying to find his way in the world. The movie is basically a horny teen’s pot-soaked recollection of the feel of the late 70s/early 80s. With the help of his “Animal House” Betamax and a bottle of Jägermeister, this spaced-out-on-Mary-Jane dweeb spins one hell of a story that is 20 percent truth, 80 percent bald fabrication.
Let’s deal with the truth first. The dweeb recalls some really boring memories that, to us, ring with candid honesty. For one, he remembers his first love in college. It comes as no shock that Deutch plays the most compelling person in the film. Her scenes are the best, not only because she’s the only recognizable human in the world of early-80s-ish cliché, but because she moves with an earthy calmness that grounds the film, providing a somewhat universal foundation. She fits perfectly with the other unspectacular youth in Linklater’s stable: Lawrence (“School of Rock”), Mason Jr. (“Boyhood”) and all the teens in “Dazed and Confused.”
Her conversations with Jake also fit beautifully within Linklater’s larger web of language. Linklater’s speciality is profundity through banality. He has mastered a beautiful, shufflin’ aesthetic that prides little moments over big ones. His fascinating approach to dialogue cares more about the “style” of conversations rather than their content. The same can be said of the Jake-Bev scenes of them walking and talking, with the camera listening rapturously to the only-sometimes-profound kidspeak. It’s never about what Linklater’s characters say, it’s about how they say it (or, perhaps, how they don’t say what they really want to say).
Our dweeb recalls other sweet specifics from his college years. Choice backdoor-poetic images include a close-up of one of the players popping beer bottle-caps off a counter with his bare hands, a pipe-smoking player reading Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels” and a cruder-than-oil locker-room hazing (filmed in one energetic long take). Later, as the Bat Pack listlessly combs the roads in their beat-up pickup, they spend a good two minutes singing along to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” Along with a stellar scene of the bros hitting a bong and speaking in chucklesome high-speak, these moments help us understand the beauty in Linklater’s nostalgia. Linklater gives his actors a generous, Cassavetes-esque amount of time to extend the sequence beyond convention. These mundane slices of life, where nothing exciting happens, are the film’s most touching moments.
But, the dweeb also spins stories of “sexy” shit that didn’t happen, showing how much he has to learn about life. The hushed “little” moments of “Everybody Wants Some!!” get garishly painted over with a repulsive gloss of swaggering, irritating machismo. Male ego pumps up every corner of the frame, which ends up engorging, not supporting, the delicacy of Linklater’s observations. Nuance and universality (Linklater’s most precious tools) get drowned in the sea of white, butt-slapping, self-absorbed dudeness.
The sweaty party scenes have an obsessive focus on females in various forms of ditzy nudeness. When some smart ladies turn down our jock heroes, the boys agree they must be “lesbians.” Later, one of the boys showing Jake the college ropes explains, “Ya know, the girls can be just as slutty as the guys,” encouraging their boyish horniness and bro-code obnoxiousness. In both instances, we’re meant to laugh at their youthful cheekiness, laughing off their crudeness by saying “Boys will be boys, amirite?”
This lowbrow, stuck-in-the-’70s attitude is indicative of the film’s misplaced nostalgia for an era that only exists in the hallucinatory, popular re-imaginings of movies like “Animal House” and “Porky’s.” The problem is Linklater doesn’t seem to think “Everybody Wants Some!!” should be treated as awestruck nostalgia. In his view, it is a worthier alternative to our more “cynical,” jaded times.
What’s most frustrating about the uneven “Everybody Wants Some!!” is its refusal to keep detached from these simplistic scenes. For every scraggly-good scene, there are three loose-booty/bad scenes. The worst offenders are a too-blatant sex montage, several clichéd uses of slow-mo and a rhythmless split-screen phone conversation between Jake and Bev. The lack of a narrative is not the problem, of course. It’s the half-baked approach to the material that bolsters this Linklater film’s “meh”-ness.
When Linklater locks himself into a single perspective, he comes up with winners. But when he tries to encapsulate an era first and understand people second, he ends up with the lazy energies of “Everybody Wants Some!!”
Contact Carlos Valladares at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.