Linklater’s ‘80s gem radiates something profound
|||EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!
DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater
CAST: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Glen Powell, Wyatt Russell
CLASSIFICATION: 16 DL
RUNNING TIME: 116 minutes
RATING: 4 stars (out of 5)
Jake Coyle
RICHARD Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is the director’s self-described spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused and – somewhat miraculously – the spirit has remained intact.
It’s been 23 years from one to the other: long enough to watch a boy grow up. But between the 1970s high school graduation of Dazed and the first college days of the 1980-set Everybody Wants Some!! it feels as if hardly a summer has passed. We left off with Foghat’s Slow Ride; we pick up with The Knack’s My Sharona.
The song’s thumping bass, which opens the film, is an early signal of the exuberance to come in Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater’s loose and affectionately antic portrait of college life. It’s a chapter that Linklater’s Boyhood never got to, but it’s rendered with the same attention to the rhythms of youth that the director has long been drawn to. But unlike Boyhood, it also has bong hits, disco dancing and sex – lots of it. It’s a laid-back Animal House, with shots of philosophy mixed in.
Jake Bradford (Jenner) is a freshman baseball pitcher who arrives at Southeast Texas University in 1980, where he moves in with his future teammates and frat brothers. Bros are not the most loved of college types, but Linklater’s frat guys, aside from being competitive, womanising booze-hounds, are mostly clever, curious and likable.
Linklater has assembled a strong ensemble of young actors. They include the star senior Glenn (Hoechlin), the chatterbox Finn (Powell) and the stoner, Willoughby (Russell). Jake easily joins them as they bounce from nightclub to nightclub and prowl parking lots for women.
There isn’t much tension in Everybody Wants Some!! The guys are all eagerness and appetite, with their lives ahead of them. Although they take their sport seriously, professional baseball is largely a pipe dream. Besides, there’s so much more to be excited about. Every night is a different club. Books and records are passed around like joints.
A countdown to the start of classes runs throughout. Out of the aimlessness, a sense of purpose is growing. The world is opening up to Jake, who begins dating a theatre student (Zoey Deutch).
By focusing on baseball players, Linklater has given a far more tender picture of young male athletes than they are usually afforded. However, he’s also limited his canvas, compared to the more varied teens of Dazed. While the sunny Jenner is winning, he’s doing so perhaps too much. Dazed and Confused took its centre from Wiley Wiggins’s timid teen, but Jake has no anxieties to overcome; his first blush with college life is a home run.
This is Linklater’s self-portrait of the artist as a young frat boy. The Austin writer-director of Slacker and the Before... trilogy went to college on a baseball scholarship before segueing into playwriting.
His light touch remains a marvel. Although his characters are often just bouncing from conversation to conversation, night out to night out, the film’s direction is never lackadaisical.
The performances are natural. Scenes that play out through car windows, over football tables or between bong hits are funny and meaningful.
Although stuffed with ’80s details and a soundtrack from Van Halen to the Sugar Hill Gang, the period setting matters far less than the capturing of a moment. – AP
If you liked Dazed and Confused, you will like this.