A beguiling return to the Eighties
Everybody Wants Some!! 15 Cert, 117min Dir Richard Linklater Starring Blake Jenner, Juston Street, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Glenn Powell, Temple Baker, Zoey Deutch
Here are three problems for Everybody Wants Some!!, the new film from Richard Linklater. First, it follows the director’s career-topping, 12-years-in-the-making masterpiece Boyhood. Second, it has to weather comparisons to his iconic Seventies-set high school movie Dazed and Confused, to which it’s a spiritual sequel. And third, whether discerning cinema-goers will stand for those two exclamation marks in the title, which is borrowed from a Van Halen song.
Let’s just say none of these concerns turns out to be long-lived: on the exclamation marks, I’d be happy to allow Linklater another 16 of them, and a winky-face, tongue-out emoji, providing he keeps making films this pleasurable, and which shoulder this much wisdom as lightly as a shrug.
Everybody Wants Some!! takes place during the empty weekend before the start of a new academic year at a Texas college: the precise point at which Boyhood came to a close. Boyhood made you feel time flowing past you, like you were in a stream of the stuff, but in Everybody Wants Some!!, the current drops completely. This is a film about a single, millpond-still moment in life, during which all of adulthood is still just a shiver of potential.
That means there’s not much plot. But there is a lot of activity – the film is an unending chain of parties, drinking, flirting and even a little naked Twister. It unfolds in 1980, and is date-stamped with the same jokey precision as Dazed
and Confused: an opening caption says “Thursday August 6th, three days and 15 hours before class”. Throughout, you know exactly how little time for aimlessness remains – which just makes the wasting of it sweeter.
The closest you get to a main character is Jake (Blake Jenner, from the TV series Glee), a new first-year student and the college baseball team’s latest recruit. The team-mates live together and to the older ones, such as the gregarious Finn (Glen Powell) and the richly moustachioed McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), Jake is initially just a new butt for old jokes. But slowly he’s welcomed into their clique.
Linklater’s screenplay slyly sets up each one as a recognisable high-school-movie varietal (the ladies’ man, the goofball, the psycho, and so on), then allows the stereotypes to unravel. The characters often seem to be immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.
The boys spend time together at a disco, a country-and-western club, a punk rock gig and a performing-arts faculty party where Jake gets to know drama student Beverly (a tremendous Zoey Deutch), allowing for some blissful Linklater back-and-forths, and the momentary, necessary puncturing of the film’s testosterone bubble.
The look of the film – hair, costumes, even sunlight – is exactly right. The sound of it is even better. Music constantly plays from ubiquitous car stereos and turntables, and every scene has its own groove.