Butler's Cinema Scene

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“EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!” My rating: B 

117 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Nothing much happens in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” Nor is the film in any hurry to get there.

But that’s the movie’s charm.

Set in 1980 on the weekend before fall classes begin at the fictional Southeast Texas University, this rollicking comedy envisions how the high school athletes from Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” might deal with their first college experience.

Our hero is Jake (Blake Jenner), a lanky, smart and just-a-bit naive kid who looks like a young Matt Dillon.  Jake has landed a scholarship to play baseball at SETU. He’s been assigned to live with other players in a ratty, water-stained off-campus residence.

Any resemblance to “Animal House” is not coincidental.

Jake arrives as a couple of the upperclassmen are using a garden hose to fill a waterbed. The added weight threatens to bring down the kitchen ceiling. One resident doesn’t see the point: “It’s like having sex with a girl on top of another really fat girl.”

Jake and the other freshman players are welcomed to the club with good-natured hazing, practical jokes, and much loquacious philosophizing from Finn (Glen Powell), a fabulously entertaining chap who is part intellectual, part standup comic, and mostly party animal.

The older guys show the newbies the campus ropes. They cruise the dorm parking lots where the coeds are moving in.  They sample the night life:  a disco ballroom, a country/western dive, a punk rock club.

Along the way Jake meets a cute performing arts major (Zoey Deutch, daughter of actress Leah Thompson and director Howard Deutch) with whom he begins what might become a monumental romance.

Blake Jenner, Glen Powell

All of this is treated by writer/director Linklater as if it’s simultaneously irrelevant and the most important thing ever.

This is very much a memory play, one suspects, a giddy immersion into long-gone youthful exuberance and carefree misbehavior. It’s a celebration of that last-gasp blow-your-brains-out-partying final bacchanal before the onslaught of classes and regular daily baseball practice.

And talk about living in the moment! Linklater gives us a dozen or more characters, making sure that every one of them gets a solo on the bandstand. Though it doesn’t seem to have any destination, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is a driven work, beautifully paced to ensure that there’s always something interesting to look at and something hilarious to laugh at.

So, yeah, it’s a comedy about a bunch of horny guys, but it’s been arranged like a symphony.

Is it important? Well, certainly not in the way that Linklater’s “Boyhood” was “important.” But give it a chance and “Everybody…” will have you wishing you were 18 again and hitting campus for the first time.

| Robert W. Butler