Directed by: Olivia Wilde
Starring: Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, Mason Gooding, Billie Lourd
Rated R, 102 minutes
“Booksmart” is an instantly recognizable movie. A comedy about teenagers achingly close to getting out of high school, “Booksmart” follows in the same tradition as movies like “Superbad” and “Can’t Hardly Wait” and, going back even further, the films of John Hughes. In other words, the concept is familiar, the story unsurprising.
Make no mistake, that’s the whole point. The actress Olivia Wilde, making her directorial debut, has assembled a movie about the assumptions we make about others and about ourselves. Fittingly, the movie uses various teen movie clichés and stereotypes as reference points, and then flips them upside down. If the writing weren’t so sharp, the performances so lively, it would be a slog of “Don’t judge a book by its cover” platitudes; instead, it’s the best movie of the year so far.
Following two seniors on the eve of their high school graduation, “Booksmart” gets in your face early and often. Best friends Molly (Beanie Feldstein, “Lady Bird”) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever, “Short Term 12”), have spent the last four years studying hard and doing little else. Having always looked down on the jocks and weirdos and “popular” kids at school, they’re stunned to find out that, like the two of them, many of those students have also gotten into elite universities. Now, regretting their straight-and-narrow lives—it turns out work and fun never had to be mutually exclusive—Molly and Amy decide to set out for one last (well, for them, first) wild night of partying, hoping to make up for lost time.
The movie’s greatest strength is undoubtedly the pairing of Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever. Molly and Amy aren’t just friends, but fully codependent partners who converse in their own language and unconsciously dress in similar (if not outright matching) outfits and egg each other on whenever they get nervous. In Feldstein and Dever’s hands, this central friendship is over the top and ecstatic, with occasional quiet moments that reveal the true depths of their reliance on each other. Many intense moments are shouted, but the most critical secrets are whispered.
Meanwhile, other characters add bright splashes of color: the doofus who serves as their class vice president; the skater girl that Amy has an all-consuming crush on; the rich girl who always manages to appear right behind them. The adults get in on the fun, too—teachers, parents, even a pizza delivery driver, all with their own sharply crafted idiosyncrasies. In one emblematic scene, Amy and Molly discover that their morose principal drives for Lyft; riding in his back seat, incongruously lit with about a thousand red lights, they share an awkward silence with him that seems to go on forever.
Olivia Wilde excels at making these moments pop. It helps to have an excellent script full of vibrant dialogue and characters as ridiculous as they are endearing, but Wilde’s interpretation showcases plenty of directorial flair and an innate sense of comedic timing. Where awkward silences creep into conversations (which happens repeatedly), Wilde knows exactly how long to let them linger. And whenever Molly and Amy get into one of their shared frenzies, the editing follows suit, snapping between shots and scenes with enough force to give you whiplash. Throw in some choice music cues, and the movie’s pacing almost feels like a character unto itself. This isn’t a long movie, but it flies by anyway.
If “Booksmart” has any major flaw, it lies with its high school movie stereotypes. Sure, the movie counters these—the idiotic rich kid has hopes and dreams too! The slacker with the long hair is going off to work for Google!—but each subversion simply exerts an equal and opposite force against stereotype, which eventually feels like its own form of stereotyping. But then, this is a minor complaint; if some things are left underdeveloped, it’s only because others are developed in exhaustive detail. That, ultimately, is the movie’s greatest subversion—that it chooses what it cares about, that it trusts viewers to understand that clichés aren’t meant to be taken seriously. It trusts us to recognize Molly and Amy and not get hung up on whatever idea we might have of what a teen girl comedy is. Girls will be girls, the movie says, if you only let them.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 6/7/19.