Wise to the ways of teen girls
Booksmart makes good — and also bad, but in a good way — on its advance billing as a girl-powered Superbad. It stars Kaitlyn Dever and
Lady Bird’s Beanie Feldstein as disillusioned “A” students Amy and Molly, who spent their high school years swotting up their studies and sucking up to their teachers.
They now regret their singlemindedness, realizing that they missed out on a lot of partying that their peers enjoyed and maybe also the best years of their young lives.
They set out to set things right, by doing a lot of things wrong.
“What it took them in four years, we are doing in one night!” Molly declares. Their night will be more improvised than planned, as the girls have close encounters with booze, drugs, sex, a randy stuffed panda and a pizza-delivering weirdo.
If this was all Booksmart was about, it wouldn’t be much more than a gender-flipped version of the testosteronefuelled male comedies that normally dominate this genre.
But this directing debut by Olivia Wilde, who hasn’t always had the best acting gigs ( Life Itself, anyone?), is clever about playing the fool and wise to the ways of teen girls. Penned by Katie Silberman, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and Susanna Fogel — and how many screenplays can boast four female writers? — it’s an early contender for the best comedy of the summer.
The motivation for Amy’s and Molly’s night of living stupidly is prompted by an entirely believable exchange, when Molly discovers that many of the fellow students she’d written off as losers are going to Ivy League universities and landing sixfigure gigs in Silicon Valley. When Molly complains to them that it’s not fair because “you guys don’t even care about school,” a girl retorts, “No, we just don’t only care about school.”
There’s a life message in there, which might be overlooked if you only focus on the hijinks that are about to ensue — and nobody says you have to learn anything from this.
The festivities begin by getting past Amy’s clueless and smothering parents (Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte).
Other adults they’ll have to con include Jason Sudeikis as their less-than-principled school principal and Jessica Williams as a teacher who get a tad overzealous in her desire to look cool to her students. The hardest nuts to crack will be their fellow students, some of whom Amy and Molly want to get close to and others they want to run from.
There’s a lot of heart to Booksmart, as well as raunchy laughs that are provided in part by a ribald animated sequence.
Dever and Feldstein make an amusing and endearing pair, fully inhabiting characters whose foibles and hang-ups are recognizable from the real world.