MY FAVORITE MOVIES: Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

There’s a moment three-quarters of the way through Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! that speaks to the film’s greatness better than any writing could. Glen McReynolds, the baseball team’s leader and best player, has just minutes ago put Jay Niles, the team’s overconfident transfer pitcher, in his place. Not only has McReynolds effortlessly knocked Niles’s “ninety mile-an-hour fastball” out of the park, but he’s also given him a thorough browbeating for his childish antics on the field. Niles initially throws another fit before storming off, but after retrieving the ball, he walks up to McReynolds and meekly tells him “good hit.” McReynolds responds thusly: “we’re cool.” And in the very next scene, Niles jumps off the rope swing into the river while the team cheers. Conflict resolved. This sequence, perhaps the most conventional setup-payoff in the movie, is illustrative of both the characters’ and Linklater’s ethos: nothing ought to get in the way of a good time.

That easygoing, laid-back vibe is exactly what makes Everybody Wants Some!! one of the finest American comedies ever made. Linklater eschews all but the most inconsequential of conflict and narrative, instead content to follow around a group of likable (and amusingly unlikeable) people, trusting that their interactions and antics will be enough. Not only is it enough, it ranks amongst the most delightful two hours in film history.

A lot of the fun owes to the soundtrack, curated and deployed expertly by Linklater. In an era of needle drops as lazy signifiers and hackneyed “irony,” it’s genuinely refreshing to see a director able to treat pop music as its own text, interacting with and enhancing the film proper. The film begins with The Knack’s power-pop classic “My Sharona” ringing out on Jake Bradford’s speakers as he drives into a Texas college town. Right off the bat, the tone is set by Berton Averre’s pumping riff and Jake’s goofy grin: fun, energetic adventures are ahead. On the opposite side, Linklater soundtracks a tender sequence late in the film to Dire Straits’ “Hand in Hand,” an earnestly romantic gesture that still maintains the film’s overall coziness. Each track, even those that only play in the background, is carefully curated to match both the tone of the scene and the loquacious energy of the film overall.

But the finest musical moment comes in the film’s third sequence. After introducing an ensemble cast when Jake arrives at his off-campus housing, Linklater is tasked with establishing camaraderie between the entire main cast in an efficient way. His solution may be the greatest stroke of low-key brilliance in his entire career: having five of the main characters pile into a car together and do karaoke to “Rapper’s Delight.” The song isn’t even introduced with a typical “I love this song!” Linklater simply cuts to the rap already in progress, with philosophical goofball Finn leading and sardonic sophomore Dale Douglas providing ad-libs. With this quick sequence, Linklater sets up the already blossoming companionship between the team in a thoroughly enjoyable (and relatable) way, understanding the communal power of music. With minimal dialogue and just one terrific song, Linklater has already established five characters better than most movies’ entire runtime.

As skilled as Linklater is at pop music selection, a good soundtrack alone can’t make a first-rate hangout film — for that, you need a truly great cast of characters. The group Linklater assembles here merits comparisons to the finest ensembles in film history, described perfectly by Mike D’Angelo as “a diverse cross-section of jockery.” Jake Bradford is the group’s everyman, our entry point into this world of hyper-masculine competition and foolishness. It would be tempting to read him as bland — certainly, he has less defining characteristics than the rest of the cast — but Blake Jenner skillfully adds subtle depth, allowing Jake to come off as slightly awkward but significantly sharper than his jock appearance lets on. When Jake falls for the group’s “impossible push-up” prank, he allows just a bit of flustered indignity to come out in his line reads; on the flip side, his conversations with his crush Beverly reveal a clever young man who’s almost too earnest for his peers on the baseball team. At the end of the film, Finn teases Jake about his newfound romance with Beverly: “that. was. adorable!” Finn’s not wrong, but the moment is revealing: Jake is interested in a type of human connection that the rest of his team couldn’t care less about.

Surrounding Jake is the aforementioned ensemble, a team of ringers each with their own quirks and traits that give them surprising depth. Dale Douglas, the team’s second baseman, carries himself with a relaxed cool, delivering great lines with a wry smirk — yet he’s stealthily kinder than he lets on, befriending the team freshmen and offering them advice on dealing with the upperclassmen. Nesbit serves as the team’s “weirdo,” pushed into the realm of manic brilliance by Austin Amelio, delivering lines like a mad scientist and carrying his body like a spindly scarecrow.

But of the cast, it’s Tyrone Plummer and Finn who stand out the most. Tyrone is the “dumb guy” on the team, but neither Linklater nor Temple Baker make him out as anything other than loveable. For one, he’s given some of the best lines — he’s introduced searching and failing to find a simile for having sex on a water bed, describing it as “like having sex with a chick on top of another, fatter chick.” Nothing about his character comes off as cruel or mocking, as both Linklater and the cast seem to sincerely enjoy his presence and the poorly thought-out remarks he brings to the conversation. By contrast, Finn is perhaps the smartest member of the team, constantly rambling and analyzing every situation with semi-profound inquiry (though he’s never too principled for anything, donning cowboy getup to attend a country bar despite his antipathy towards that scene). Glen Powell, in one of the best supporting performances of the 2010s, imbues each line with an animated zeal; each declarative statement and philosophical musing played like a performance within a performance. Indeed, he often calls attention to the artifice of his own behavior, describing himself as a “chameleon” willing to put on any affect to charm someone, usually a woman. His colorful personality doesn’t distract from his genuine compassion, however, as he allows himself to serve as a mentor figure for his teammates — calling out Nezbit’s bad wagers, and reminding Jake to keep perspective: “we all take turns being the bitch around here.”

As delightful as the entire baseball team in Everybody Wants Some!! may be, the key to the film is none of them. Rather, what pushes Everybody out of the realm of a strictly bro-y comedy and into one of the finest films ever made is Beverly, the sharp aspiring actress that quickly becomes Jake’s romantic interest. Beverly is introduced not with a meet-cute moment or with a slow-motion walk-on (like many of the women in the dance club, perfectly cued to The S.O.S. Band), but by twisting a knife into Jake’s teammates. When Finn and Kenny Roper try and invite her and her roommate to a party (through two different tactics, the former hilariously giving an insincere male feminist speech), she and her roommate shoot them both down, with Beverly giving them the kicker: “I prefer the quiet guy in the back.” As Finn and Roper are quick to point out, she’s pretty obviously using Jake to mess with the older teammates, but Jake decides to pursue her regardless. When the two finally reconnect in the back half of the film, the true heart of Everybody Wants Some!! — beyond the retro-cool, the wild parties, and the goofy ultra-masculinity — is revealed.

As mentioned before, Everybody Wants Some!! is such an essential film as much for what it does than what it doesn’t, and Beverly’s character is Linklater’s shrewdest subversion of the college-party-film formula. It would be easy to make her a killjoy, or an overachiever who has to learn to enjoy partying like the boys, or a genius who immediately runs circles around Jake, as so many college-aged women are often written. Linklater opts instead to write her as something infinitely more complex: a sharp young woman who has little patience for pick-up nonsense and a genuine passion for the dramatic arts. On her first date with Jake, the two share not an instant infatuation but mutual respect that manifests as slightly awkward but thoroughly charming banter. She shares her honest thoughts on theater students and gives us a glimpse of her world’s social hierarchy (to the point where you might yearn for a companion film about her arrival at college) and tries to take an interest in Jake’s love of baseball. And finally (and most crucially) she invites Jake to a theater party — not the other way around, as one would come to anticipate from the genre.

As one might expect, all of the party scenes in Everybody Wants Some!! are great fun, possibly the most sheerly enjoyable sequences Linklater has ever directed. Whether it’s dancing in a disco club to “Shake Your Groove Thing,” grinding at the dorm to “Give Up the Funk,” or moshing to a punk cover of the Gilligan’s Island theme, Linklater finds the best way to capture the energy and movement of dance. Writers like Felipe Furtado and K. Austin Collins have noted how Everybody Wants Some!! is an exercise in body language, and the reverie of the multiple parties and clubs do a superlative job of capturing each character’s mannerisms through dance. The disco club follows a hilarious montage of the cast’s thoroughly uncool but entirely fitting moves, while the aforementioned Parliament-soundtrack dorm party captures the cramped energy of a packed house party. The second dorm party expands outwards, with characters taking advantage of every inch of the property — golfing off the roof, sliding on mattresses down the stairs, and wrestling in a mud pit outside. The latter scene is particularly in keeping with the mode of stealthily subversive filmmaking Linklater operates in: while most college party films would use this opportunity for sophomoric sexualization and pandering, Linklater sees this drunken reverie as just another fun and funny experience for everyone involved, as Nezbit even joins in the mud wrestling (and immediately get pummeled by his female opponent, too). I don’t mean to suggest that Everybody Wants Some!! is a critique of masculinity or an exercise in skewering the male gaze; far from it. Merely that Linklater’s aims are to share the fun the characters of all genders have, and finding poetry in their hedonism.

Returning to the theater party, Beverly’s invitation of Jake (and Jake’s invitation of the whole team) further illustrates Linklater’s ethos. As previously mentioned, most party films would have Jake bring Beverly back to his home turf — Everybody Wants Some!! instead brings Jake and his team to the unknown world, forcing the guys to adapt to a different scene. On the surface, the theater party offers some of the film’s purest comic pleasures: Tyrone’s incredulous reaction to a cat in the fridge; Finn’s pick-up shenanigans being even lamer than usual; and Jake trying out his thespian skills. But digging deeper, Linklater still finds ways to capture the team’s behavior and highlight its ludicrousness in a different context — Jake’s arrival in costume, for example, causes his team to cheer like he’s hit a home run. Finn also gets a classic third-act speech here: “Have you noticed whenever we’re around baseball all we talk about is pussy. Now, we’re actually around a few potentially interesting young women, all you talk about is baseball. It’s a little fucked up!” Finn’s not wrong, and in any other movie this would be an earnest moment meant to cause the rest of the team to do some earnest reflection. But Linklater, again refusing classical structure, has the rest of the team react realistically: mocking Finn’s speech with goofy imitation. As written, this sounds cruel; in the film, it’s just another funny exchange between friends, a satisfying non-resolution to a potentially serious plot thread. While Linklater’s sympathy is clearly in Finn’s corner here (again, highlighting the absurdities of the team’s behavior by placing it in a new context), he also refuses to indulge in the mood-killing “serious time” or pretend a huffy, indignant speech like that wouldn’t be laughed off by a team of jocks. And in the very next scene, Finn takes his own advice — it works like a charm.

As the film winds down and hours remain before classes begin, the focus returns to Jake and Beverly (I must add, the autumnal early-morning cinematography in this section captures the mood of impending responsibility better than just about any movie I’ve seen. Linklater’s not usually considered a great formalist, but there’s a texture to this scene that’s truly remarkable). Though the section after the party is their Big Romantic Moment, it’s played in a similarly understated fashion to the rest of the film. Beverly reminds Jake that their meet-cute was really a meet-snarky, and as sweet as the two’s conversation at the lake is, it too has its own silliness with Jake comparing baseball to Sisyphus. Similarly, when the two say farewell as Jake heads to class, their awkward kiss goodbye is (as previously mentioned) immediately undercut by loving taunts from Jake’s friends. What’s remarkable about this section is that, despite it refusing to indulge in the tired aspects of most “romantic subplots” that plague bad coming-of-age films, it still achieves the warmth and joy of the best of them. Jake and Beverly share genuine chemistry, and the aforementioned embrace is, like Finn says, adorable. This romance shows that artificial, “cinematic” conflict published in screenwriting manuals isn’t necessary for first-rate storytelling; just a genuine commitment to understanding humans is more than enough.

And that’s the pleasure of Everybody Wants Some!! in a nutshell. Like so many of the best comedies, it achieves greatness through a dogged refusal to be anything but itself — which perhaps gives the film an unassuming quality that led so many critics to write it off as “slight.” Everybody Wants Some!! is slight in the same way Bringing Up Baby and Some Like It Hot are, as great comedy often has the side effect of seeming effortless. Yet a decade of mediocre coming-of-age comedies has shown that what Linklater does here is anything but. True brilliance doesn’t always come from something flashy; sometimes genius can be found in, as Willoughby puts it, the tangents within the framework. Therein lies the artistry, man.