Movie Review: “Everybody Wants Some!!” in Richard Linklater’s collegiate hangout odyssey.

Way back in 1993, Texas auteur Richard Linklater made what many consider to be the greatest high school movie of all time with “Dazed and Confused,” his bleary-eyed look at adolescents pining to be cool, to be loved or to get to the most epic house party before the sun rises. “Dazed and Confused” has endured because beneath all the bell-bottoms and love beads and period-appropriate hair, it’s a pretty much universal story about how difficult it can be to find your place in the world. The high school burners of Linklater’s youth classic are as intellectually curious, in their way, as the characters in the films of French director Eric Rohmer, though they often suggest what Rohmer’s middle-class seekers might have been like had they traded their Proust paperbacks for Aerosmith tickets. “Dazed and Confused” is a great Texas movie, for sure — it captures the Lone Star state’s humid, wandering energy better than just about any film I can think of, in addition to highlighting the streetside truth-seekers, druggy conspiracy theorists and chatty deadbeats who made Linklater’s debut “Slacker” perhaps the defining independent film of the early 90’s. But beyond that, it’s also just a plain great American movie: Linklater is allergic to cynicism, and he’s in love with the multitude of freaks, dreamers and blue-collar schmoes make up the great, knotty fabric of our country.

So after the decade-spanning epic that was “Boyhood,” you can’t blame the director for wanting to cut loose and have some fun. His brilliant new film is a sunny slice of college life called “Everybody Wants Some!!” and while it’s arguably the most purely enjoyable movie in the director’s entire filmography, the movie also possesses sly depths that don’t exactly insist on themselves upon a first viewing. The film, produced by Megan Ellison and the great, risk-taking folks at Annapurna Pictures, has been billed as a “spiritual sequel” to “Dazed and Confused”: in other words, a buoyant continuation of that film’s all-night keggers, weed-a-thons and, of course, the ongoing pursuit of casual sex. And it is that, to a degree. Linklater’s newest is riotously, sometimes unreasonably funny: filled with one-liners that are destined to become instant classics and even a few perfectly-calibrated sight gags that remind you that this is the guy who directed “The School of Rock”. And yet, like almost all of Linklater’s work, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is genuinely artful, finding discursive poetry and even genuine moral inquiry in the unlikeliest of places: the booze-drenched soul of the American bro.

It’s possible that in the hands of any other filmmaker, the central gang of dudes at the center of “Everybody Wants Some!!” would be insufferable. All are alpha males of varying stripes, though all of them are fundamentally kind and good-natured at the end of the day. These might play a nasty prank on you, but they’ll buy you some pitchers of beer when the night comes around. And yet every single one of them — save for Jake Bradford, (“Glee’s” Blake Jenner) the movie’s easygoing protagonist — is monomaniacal in their obsession with one-upsmanship, athletic and otherwise. These guys turn everything into a competition, whether it’s ping-pong, knuckle-flicking contests (trust me, it’s a thing) or even bong hits. And while all this sounds pretty juvenile in theory, Linklater sketches this radiant portrait of youthful discovery with loving detail and heavy shades of autobiography. Like Jake, Linklater played college ball himself and he’s said that everything in this movie did actually happen, in one way or another. And so he proceeds to stage the group’s knuckleheaded rituals with tremendous affection and also a winning sense of sun-flecked nostalgia. And though the idea of a nudity-and-beer-soaked romp about a gang of horny baseball players doesn’t exactly sound novel on paper, I can’t imagine anyone not walking out of “Everybody Wants Some!!” with an ear-to-ear smile on their face. It’s the party movie of 2016 thus far.

Blake Jenner is Jake, this movie’s Linklater surrogate à la Mason in “Boyhood,” Ethan Hawke’s Jesse in the “Before” movies and Jason London’s laid-back slugger in “Dazed in Confused”. He’s handsome in a low-key, genial manner, and speaks with a drawling baritone that’s downright charming. Jake arrives on the dawn of an epic weekend in a small college town in Texas before his first day of college, armed with only a few cratefuls of records and a baby blue American muscle car to distinguish himself amongst the hordes of fellow undergrads. Our hero eventually takes up residence in a ramshackle old frat house that’s all but falling apart and inhabited by other members of the town’s hottest baseball team. Jake’s a pitcher, a fact that none of the other guys take kindly too. The crew is motley, and certainly aggressively male, but nevertheless loveable: it’s a group that includes Finn, (Glen Powell) a garrulous, charismatic intellectual who likes to brag to girls about his average-sized penis, Willoughby, (the wonderful Wyatt Russell) a long-haired California stoner who devours Carl Sagan books and implores Jake to “embrace his inner strange” and also McReynolds, (Tyler Hoechlin) the closest thing that the movie has to a stereotypical, chest-thumping jock. An actor named Temple Baker plays Plummer, the group’s resident “little guy,” and he is so effortlessly convincing and beautifully funny in the role that it came as a genuine shock to learn that the actor’s only previous acting credit — aside from a 2015 short film called “Love is Relative” — was an elementary school play. More than many other directors of his generation, Linklater seems exceptionally comfortable when working with non-actors or relative novices: his philosophy is fundamentally generous, and he allows each and every one of the movie’s performers to bring their own idiosyncratic gifts to the table.

One of the movie’s great pleasures is how inclusive its central characters are: they seem to have a genuinely awesome time wherever they go, and they don’t mind spreading the good vibes around. Linklater’s characters ping-pong through the many weird scenes in their native Texas, dropping in on a raucous punk show one moment and donning six-shooter hats and country flannel at a cowboy bar the next. The point is that they’re not bound to any outmoded set of social demands. They seem to be able to effortlessly imitate any societal clique they descend upon, even a wackadoodle theatre-kid party populated by artsy youngsters who look like they’ve wandered off the set of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”. In depicting the Texas of his youth, Linklater sprinkles the already-loose narrative with cultural signifiers of his own adolescence, including Van Halen, “The Twilight Zone,” Lone Star Beer and Devo, just to name a few. And yet, the beautiful thing about “Everybody Wants Some!!” is that Linklater invites us to share in his remembrance, even if our memories of those formative years are markedly different than his. The specifics vary from group to group, but the rituals of these young people remain more or less the same: the wayward flirtations, the bumbling attempts at pride and arrogance and the partying that seems to be more about testing the limits of your physical endurance than actually having a good time is all rendered here in pitch-perfect detail and played in Linklater’s signature key of serendipitous human comedy.

As triumphant as “Everybody Wants Some!!” feels from moment to moment — and this is really a film that doesn’t stop to take much of a break, its mood of sustained ebullience is so seemingly effortless — there’s an unavoidable sadness at the movie’s core. Though the guys live nearly every second of their testosterone-fueled lives to the hilt (like “Dazed and Confused,” this is a supremely laid-back ticking-clock picture, unfolding over the course of one long, languid weekend before school and, more importantly, baseball season, begins) there’s often a palpable acknowledgement that the good times will eventually end, that the promise of babes and killer grass and an awesome time is one that has a definite shelf life. A quietly heartbreaking revelation in the movie’s third act puts the arrested development of our central group of characters in perspective when a team member (who shall remain nameless) is discovered to be a thirty-year-old degenerate faking being 18 so he can fly under the radar and indefinitely extend the turbulent pleasures of his bygone youth. “Here for a good time, not a long time, right boys?” are the character’s last words, and the wistful nature of this lament stings amidst the rest of the movie’s blissed-out haze. Linklater vicariously invites us to join the party with these hard-charging, intensely magnetic jocks, but he doesn’t pretend that things will necessarily get better for them after they graduate. The result is a rare thing: a raunchy college hangout movie with soul and a serious philosophical perspective. Leave it to Linklater to dive into the hopes, dreams and insecurities of a bunch of ball-throwing meatheads and make us care about them as deeply as we would our own friends and family.

In this age of stringent political correctness, gendered language and the fight for just sexual representation in popular media, “Everybody Wants Some!!” might seem to some to be a bit out of step with the times. This is, after all, a movie where guys grab ass freely, ply girls with beer and generally behave like crazed boors (I haven’t even mentioned the scene where some of our characters don Native American headdresses, but you can imagine the P.C. militia having a field day with that one). As always, Linklater’s aim is deeper and more human than his critics suggest. He’s clearly not suggesting these guys are saints, but he also doesn’t possess an ounce of hubris as a director, so what we get is not a generation-defining social portrait but rather a randy, rowdy, smart and ultimately moving comedy about a particular time and place and the lovable lunkheads who were there for the best of it all. Like nearly all of Linklater’s films, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is able to mine poetry from the unlikeliest of places — as one of the film’s characters says, he’s able to “find the tangents within the framework” (sounds like a line that could have come straight out of “Slacker”). From an early musical sequence in which every member of the team raps along to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” to the movie’s bittersweet climax that slyly tips its hat to “Boyhood” and suggests the second entry in an unofficial trilogy, “Everybody Wants Some!!” is a new modern classic that will likely act as a quintessential party movie as much as “Dazed and Confused” did for my generation. “Be who you are, never what they want,” one of the movie’s characters quips during a pivotal moment. Thank goodness Linklater himself never stopped taking this advice. A-