Butler's Cinema Scene

Hadley Robinson

“MOXIE” My rating: B+ (Netflix)

Running time: 111minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The highest praise I can bestow on “Moxie” is that for two hours it made me once again feel like a teenager…and left me with a much-needed sense of optimism.

Just about everything works in Amy Poehler’s film, adapted from the YA novel by Jennifer Mathieu.  (Full disclosure: Jennifer interned in The Star‘s A&E Department some 20 years ago when I was the editor).  It’s a high school movie with heart, soul and attitude.

We’re talking happy tears.

Our heroine is Vivian (Hadley Robinson, terrific in a non-glam girl-next-door way), a bright quiet girl who is most comfortable when laying low.  But it turns out that everywhere Vivian looks she sees injustice.

Her school is pretty much run by the football team, a pack of entitled meatheads led by the smugly swaggering and creepily predatory Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger…Arnold’s kid).

The jocks annually issue a sexist ranking of their fellow students. One girl is declared “most bangable.” Another has the “best bootie.”  Vivian is humiliated to find herself designated “most obedient.”

What’s really irritating is that the footballers are the constant object of adoration despite a mediocre record; meanwhile the girls’ soccer squad — perennial contenders for the state championship — have to make do with last year’s grass-stained jerseys.

Taking some inspiration from her single mom Lisa (Poehler), whose own teen years were devoted to Bikini Kill-inspired rebellion, Vivian writes and designs her own feminist “zine,” a Xeroxed howl of indignation entitled Moxie!.

She pays to have 50 copies printed and secretly deposits them in the girls’ restrooms. And suddenly the school is abuzz with  female umbrage  and a growing mystery.

Hadley Robinson, Alycia Pascual-Peña

Who is behind Moxie!?   What cause will it champion next? Could it become a movement?

When one of her female classmates is humiliated by the principal (Marcia Gay Harden) for violating the dress code (guys can get away with wearing anything), Moxie! takes up the cause, declaring in its pages  a Tank Top Day as a show of solidarity. It appears that anonymously our girl has become a force to be reckoned with.

Like the source novel, “Moxie” walks a fine line. It could have been shrilly polemical, but Poehler and her cast find a sweet spot balancing outrage/anger, laugh-out-loud hilarity and a growing sense of empowerment.

Moreover, between hot-button issues the film revels in Vivian’s personal maturation. She finds a  friend in the bold take-no-crap  newcomer Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña)…but only at the risk of alienating her oldest gal pal, the bookish and withdrawn Claudia (Lauren Tsai).

She delights in the stirrings of first love, thanks to Seth (Nico Hiraga), a childhood acquaintance who has blossomed into a skate-boarding hunk with a matter-of-fact acceptance of feminist principles.

And, yeah, Vivian sometimes lets her newfound fury boil over into assholism, making life miserable for Mom and her new boyfriend (Clark Gregg).

In its final moments “Moxie” stumbles a bit, introducing a very dark element (sexual assault) and an uplifting spontaneous eruption of youthful solidarity that is a lot closer to hopeful wish fulfillment than real-world experience.

But this lapse is far from fatal.  By this time we’ve been so swept up in the exuberant performances and almost giddy sense of growing self-awareness that nothing short of a seamless sellout could screw up the experience.

Overall “Moxie” feels amazingly on the money — no doubt Mathieu’s experiences as a high school English teacher have something to do with its sense of authenticity.

| Robert W. Butler