Booksmart

Booksmart deserves no credit for being a raunchy comedy about nerdy high-schoolers going nutso for the same reason nobody accepted the twenty-dollar bills I scanned and printed at home. I did that a long time ago when those printer-scanners weren’t nearly as good as they are today, and when I believed everyone who worked at a liquor store was going to be too drunk to notice. I mean, it’s a reasonable assumption; if I worked at a liquor store, I’d drink so much Fuegon I’d shit red for weeks. When it was all gone, I’d work my way through the Four Loko Gold until I shit more red, only this time blood.

But liquor stores won’t hire you if you tell them during the interview that you’ll drink their inventory, even if you bribe them with a thick stack of fresh twenties. Anyway, the point I was trying to make there was that printers are a lot better nowadays, and it’s probably worth trying again.

Also, Booksmart is a Xerox of its genre. Teens with little to no experience with alcohol, drugs and sex decide to throw caution to the wind to comedic effect. This is the plot of about 50% of the movies from the 80s and about 20% of those from the 90s. I think the best version is Superbad, which is genuinely filthy, funny and surprisingly sweet. It sets a pretty damn high bar, and Booksmart doesn’t leap over it. Instead, its hemmed in by a timid plot that connects the dots already established by other movies. The details save it from sucking, but the story itself takes almost no risks and is so synthetic that the characters’ victories feel hollow.

The difference this time is that the heroes of the story are inexperienced young women instead of men. Two nerds, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are one day from graduating high school at the top of their class when they feel pangs of regret from having spent all four years with their noses in books, busting their humps to get into good colleges. They discover that their classmates got into the same and better universities while partying, playing grabass. They decide to spend their last night pursuing what they had denied themselves. Specifically, fun and affection.

Being outsiders, they don’t know where the fun is, resulting in a wild goose chase across the student body, from a lonely, rich kid’s unattended yacht shindog to the drama kids’ murder-mystery dinner and finally to the house party where the objects of affection are making bad choices. For Molly, it’s the popular, handsome boy she always assumed was out of her league. For Amy, it’s the skater girl of vague sexual preference.

So, yeah, Amy is lesbian, which maybe some consider a groundbreaking note to the movie. They shouldn’t. Teen lesbians exist beyond Pornhub, except the real ones are just as naïve, confused and awkward as straight teens. The director Olivia Wilde plays it normal, which is right, and the way to get any laughs or sympathy out of it.

Of course, neither of the girls end up with the objects of their desire. Instead, they discover what they really want had been there all along. No, not each other, but a boy and a girl who they had never thought of before. That’s just the way these movies work. The problem is that I didn’t get the sense that who Amy and Molly end up with are the right people, just the available ones. A stronger and braver movie would have allowed them to say, “Hey, this girl likes me, and she’s sort of hot, but she isn’t what I want. But now I feel validated and can go into the world with the confidence to get what I want.” Booksmart isn’t brave or original enough for that.

Of course Molly and Amy have a major blowout about their friendships and futures that results in them separating, being miserable, and then having a deeper understanding and love for each other. It’s almost identical to the fight Michael Cera and Jonah Hill (Feldstein’s real-life brother) have in Superbad, and diminished because of that.

What also doesn’t work is the way the movie tries too hard to be funny. There are genuine laughs in this movie, and that’s a beautiful fucking thing. There’s also flop sweat, too many moments that aren’t that funny, just shoehorned in. A prime example is a scene where Molly and Amy take an Uber driven by their underpaid principal (Jason Sudeikis). The sequence is desperate drags on in search of laughs and the big punchline can be seen coming a mile away just because of the contortions the script makes to get to it. That is, Molly convinces Amy to watch some lesbian porn just to get some pointers in case she hooks up, and she uses the car’s charging cable to keep her phone from dying. The principal then, of course, accidentally broadcasts the audio over the car speakers, to the mortification of all. It takes too long, requires us to suspend our disbelief about a dozen times, and then ends up exactly where we’d expect.

So, what works. First of all, high school is way different from when I went. Back then there were cliques and a pecking order, and there were bullies. You stayed in the group you felt safe with, which for me was by myself behind the athletic fields beating off while watching softball practice. Nowadays it’s more fluid, and kids can more easily float from one interest to another. A kid can be both gay and a great athlete, or jerk off to bunting drills and be really into making Super 8mm stop motion movies. The movie captures that well, and in doing so it gives a lot of strength to secondary characters such as a molly-fueled gadfly who can appear anywhere and play the piano, or a rich kid who, despite his wealth, is pitied. A young woman can love giving blowjobs and be proud of it, and the cool kid can be totally into Harry Potter.

Those characters are what give this movie depth and humor. But they are periphery and they don’t really impact the trajectory of Molly and Amy. We’ve seen their journey before, and it’s not bold or original just because they’re women. Three Fingers for Booksmart.