In his 30-something years in the film industry, Richard Linklater has been defying any notion of conformity the entire run. Over the 18 years it took to make the Before Sunrise trilogy, he also managed to squeeze in works like School of Rock, Fast Food Nation and A Scanner Darkly, all of which fly in fairly different directions. His breathtaking opus on growing up, Boyhood, is one of the most touching pieces of cinema made in the last decade.
The vast majority of these films are very much affecting simultaneously on a personal and a universal level. Linklater loves to study individual groups within society and figure out how they’re just like the rest of us, and from a filmmaking perspective he’s hit a lot of home runs, which is why it is incredible to watch such a talented filmmaker creatively push himself despite former success.
Everybody Wants Some!! follows a group of rough and rowdy boys on the baseball team at a small-town Texas university. Comprising a relatively unknown cast of potential Hollywood hunks, Linklater takes three days of saccharine debauchery and dissects the mundane conversations between a group of men who would in real life be labeled dumb jocks. Perhaps it’s simply refreshing to see relatable interactions in a movie glorifying the glory days, but the simple humor, camaraderie, jealousy and love this cast is able to emote is quietly staggering.
Largely ignoring the baseball scenes a lesser director may feel inclined to include, the majority of Everybody Wants Some!! is spent at night in the team’s pseudo-frat cribs and the town’s disco halls and dive bars. Don’t get me wrong: The masculinity is largely overt, as it tends to be with groups of popular men. But the low-grade jokes and female lusting isn’t used to build caricatures of high school bullies; their juvenile personalities display as much insecurity as confidence.
And despite a large lack of female presence, Linklater skillfully gives the few women in the film a nice amount of directive and personality that calls for an alternate reality where the theater kids get their story told parallel to the sports stars.
The real kicker of Everybody Wants Some!! is its ability to blindly stumble into such a wonderful, brief love story that it makes you take everything that rolled before it into perspective. In under thirty minutes, Linklater reminds everyone of how powerful it can be for two bright, young, opportunistic people to find each other in a whole new world and deal with it together.
Being described for a year as the spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused didn’t really do the film any favors. Sure, they’re both about teenagers growing up in decades now long gone, but they’re not the same in tone or subject. Where Dazed thrust high school seniors into the energetic darkness of what the future held for them, EWS!! sees them land into quick and exciting comfort. Linklater’s latest doesn’t need his past accomplishments to prop it up, and I don’t think Linklater expects it to. Be on the lookout for the inevitable next iteration of the ‘90s post-college romp Loser (and round home plate to Linklater’s first feature, Slacker, while you’re at it).
