“Booksmart” takes a familiar blueprint and uses it to build a movie we haven’t seen often enough: an R-rated teen comedy (meaning, a comedy about teenagers) focusing on a great female friendship.
The movie’s not always as wonderful as that friendship. Some bits are hilarious yet life-like, while others belong to medium-high-grade situation comedy, a realm of snappy, quippy comic exaggeration all about the stereotypes, though here the stereotypes are turned inside out, at least. Mainly, “Booksmart” works because Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are so magically right together.
Tonewise the movie roughly halfway between the 2007 “Superbad” (which co-starred Feldstein’s brother, Jonah Hill) and last year’s trenchant, affecting “Eighth Grade.” Somewhere in Los Angeles, another senior class is about to graduate. At this particular school the smartest, most dedicated, most purpose-driven students are Molly (Feldstein), headed to Yale, and Amy (Dever), off to Columbia University, though she has her doubts.
They’ve been friends for years. Molly is straight; Amy is gay; both have yet to fully explore their sexuality. Each young woman has a titanic crush on a fellow student. For Molly, student council president, Mr. Right is the student council vice-president, a one-boy popularity contest named Nick (Mason Gooding). For Amy, Ms. Right is the sunny skateboard fiend Ryan (Victoria Ruesga).
Time is short; it’s the final day of senior year, and Molly and Amy come to the crushing realization they’re not the only high-achieving, Ivy League-bound kids at the school. They are, however, the only ones who forgot to have any conventional, mainstream notion of “fun” along the way.
The mission, which they choose to accept, is simple in “Booksmart.” Amy and Molly set their sights on crashing an end-of-year party held at Nick’s aunt’s house. En route they spend some excruciating minutes-that-feel-like-months at a yacht party thrown by wildly insecure billionaire’s son Jared (Skyler Gisondo), as well as an equally torturous interactive murder mystery party overseen by the drama club control freaks played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute.
The script packs many more characters into “Booksmart.” Four writers are credited: Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and the last one in, Katie Silberman, who revised it, brought it up to date and set the tone. Director Olivia Wilde makes a highly assured and pace-conscious feature filmmaking debut, and while a lot of the humor’s broad and pretty crude, there’s a complicated sweetness to the central characters.
When we first see Feldstein (so good in Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” as the title character’s best friend) and Dever together on screen, Amy’s picking Molly up for school. In a bit largely improvised by the actors, they run through a series of semi-ridiculous poses and dance moves as if they do that routine every morning of their lives. That’s an example (there are others) of authentic-seeming comic gold in “Booksmart.”
Other elements of the film are more routine or consciously engineered for narrative purposes, such as the conflict that brings their friendship to a crisis point. At times Wilde’s direction leans on well-worn teen-trope techniques — slow-motion struts, over-emphatic musical cues, a last-minute action climax, though at least this one’s fairly low-keyed.
The vision of high school depicted by “Booksmart” will no doubt look and feel alien to roughly half the country. It’s a highly evolved and happily tolerant beehive of cliques and sub-cultures we see, navigated handily by Molly and Amy — a liberal Eden, even with all the sniping and gossip. The visual details include an Elizabeth Warren 2020 bumper sticker on the old Volvo Amy drives, while Molly’s bedroom wall features a Ruth Bader Ginsburg poster.
Some critics, notably Richard Brody in The New Yorker, aren’t buying it: He recently wrote it off as “a teen drama that, I suspect, hardly any teens will want to see … it doesn’t at all resemble the high-school snark tank” of reality-based high school narratives.
I don’t agree. A lot of the alleged classic teen movies in the John Hughes “Breakfast Club” vein ended up intensifying and spreading the most galling stereotypes in the name of entertainment. I like the general lack of meanness in “Booksmart.” The party-all-night premise may be as old as the hills, but the script has been successfully finessed as a slice of the here and now, idealized but full of life.
Now, all we need is a few thousand more movies about young women, all kinds of young women in all kinds of situations, and we’ll start to see the 21st century teen comedy genre’s true possibilities.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
“Booksmart” — 3 stars
MPAA rating: R (for strong sexual content and language throughout, drug use and drinking — all involving teens)
Running time: 1:42
Opens: Thursday evening
