Everybody Wants Some!!
In September of 1980, the world was in transition. Actor turned California governor Ronald Reagan was challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter. In Eastern Europe, workers were beginning to unionize, weakening the oppressive Soviet regime. At Southeast Texas State University, freshman Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) was making his awkward first steps into manhood.
“It’s pretty autobiographical,” confesses Academy Award nominated director, writer and producer Richard Linklater. “Looking back, I realize it was a fun time to be in college, not only personally, but it was an interesting cultural moment. It was still the end of the 70s. What people now think of as the 80s really didn’t kick in until ’82 or ’83.
As soon as he arrives at the baseball houses, the frat like homes of STU’s baseball team, Jake receives a less than friendly welcome from senior Glenn McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) and his roommate Roper (Ryan Guzman).
“McReynolds’ and Roper see it as their responsibility to toughen up the new guys,” says Hoechlin, explaining his character’s open hostility to his housemates.
“In high school, Jake was a star athlete,” says Jenner. “He’s used to a certain level of respect, but he learns pretty quickly that doesn’t mean anything here.”
Even worse, Jake is a pitcher, a position McReynolds’ views as “weird” and “a necessary evil”, an opinion likely formed from STU’s bullpen, a line-up consisting of Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a pot-smoking mystic and Cosmos enthusiast, Jay Niles (Juston Street) a delusional powder keg who believes himself the second coming of Nolan Ryan, Nesbit (Austin Amelio) a hopelessly compulsive gambler, and dip chewing good ol’ boy Billy Autry (Will Brittain), whose housemates promptly assign him the less flattering, more bumpkinish moniker of “Beuter Perkins.”
Providing the sobering ying to McReynolds and Roper’s raging yang is charismatic and fast-talking Finnegan (Glen Powell.) “They break’em down, but Finn builds them back up,” says Powell. “He plays pranks, but it’s never vicious. It’s a rite of passage. At one point he says ‘We all take turns being chumps. You just have to accept your chumpification and pass it on.”’
Finn takes the freshmen under his wing, becoming their de facto tour guide to this brave new world without curfews, and enabling his penchant for arm chair philosophizing. “Finn has two great loves,” says Powell, “Baseball and sex. If he’s playing baseball, he’s thinking about sex. If he’s having sex, he’s thinking about baseball.”
The tour begins with a trip to the girls’ dorms, where Finn’s hard sell is immediately rebuffed, but Jake catches the eye of Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a freshman theater major.
“Beverly is everything that Jake isn’t,” says Deutch. “She’s a performer who knows nothing of the sports world; Jake knows nothing about the theater. Still, there’s an attraction there and they have the weekend to explore it before school starts and everyone settles into their routines.”
Classification 15