Butler's Cinema Scene

Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever

“BOOKSMART” My rating: B 

112 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Booksmart” is being described as a female-centric version of “Superbad.” Well it is…but it’s more.

For her feature directorial debut actress Olivia Wilde (with the assistance of four screenwriters) has given us one of those teen-age all-nighter comedies, with all the raunch, substance sampling, and sexual awakening the genre implies.

The difference, of course, is that instead of giving us horny adolescent boys we follow a couple of graduating senior girls who have spent their entire high school careers toeing the line and are now ready to party down.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein, whose brother Jonah Hill starred in ‘”Superbad”) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) have done everything right.  Great grades, lots of activities, student government, the whole deal.  And it has all paid off with Molly’s admission to Yale and Amy’s plan for a gap year of charity work in Africa.

Initially the two feel superior to their party-hearty classmates who will undoubtedly be heading for military service or the local junior college. But when Molly and Amy learn that many of those slackers have themselves landed in great college situations, they question everything.

I mean, why do everything right if it doesn’t give you leg up on the animals? Realizing they have pretty much wasted their youth on the quest for scholastic greatness, the best buds decide to hit their classmates’ rowdy night-before-graduation bacchanal.

They are, of course, ill prepared to party down. They never really got to know their fellow students in any depth, and their efforts to blend in are hopelessly klutzy.

Beanie Feldstein

Along the way they interact with rich kid Jared (Skyler Gisando), another outsider who is pathetically trying to buy his way into his peers’ good favor. They dabble with drink and drugs and sexuality.  They even get a ride from a serial killer.

“Booksmart” is often blisteringly funny, but the film’s real strength lies with its two young stars. Feldstein and Dever (she had a terrific run as a tart-tongued adolescent hillbilly weed dealer on cable’s “Justified”) are so natural — so self-assured behind their characters’ social naivete — that you can’t help but love them. They genuinely seem to be best friends, with their own inside jokes, mannerisms and mind-melds.

Their geekiness is charming and infectious — for who amongst us has not at one time or another felt part of hapless geekdom? Feldstein is particularly strong, a can-do type who throws herself into depravity with the same stubborn determination that is sending her to the Ivy League.

Wilde has called in some strong supporting players:  Wilde’s squeeze Jason Sudeikis as the don’t-bother-me school principal, Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte as clueless parents, Jessica Williams as a teacher not that far removed from her own partying days and curious to check out how another generation gets it on.

Along with everything else, “Booksmart” is good looking — certainly better than it needs to be.

| Robert W. Butler