I admire Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some, but I hated the experience of watching it and hope to never see it again.
Wow. That was a really harsh. What the heck is wrong with me? People were calling this movie a “a masterwork” after its SXSW premiere earlier this year. Who the heck am I to disagree? What could I possibly have against Richard Linklater? The dude’s so lovable. He made a movie about convicted murderer Bernie Tiede, and then let him live above his garage! Who does that kind of thing? Plus, he directed Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy and Boyhood. In short, he’s always reliable for a low-key, meandering character study with a killer soundtrack, and Everybody Wants Some certainly fits the bill.
Set at a Texas college in 1980, the movie follows incoming freshman athlete Jake (Blake Jenner) as he moves into an off-campus house with the rest of the university’s baseball players four days prior to the start of the fall semester. That means they have four days to do nothing but party, get laid, party some more, get laid again and generally behave like hyper-competitive dudes. It’s like a Porkies movie where the debauchery is occasionally punctured by Jake or the team’s season veteran and deceptively deep thinker Finnegan (Glen Powell) stopping to offer a quasi-sociological observation about their behavior and hazy long-term future.
In interviews, Linklater has admitted that if he’d gotten around to it sooner Everybody Wants Some would have been a direct sequel to Dazed and Confused. It certainly runs with the same “atmosphere over story” ethos, and continues Linklater’s mission to cinematically tell us, “So, this is what it was like to grow up in Texas at this very specific moment in time,” 1976 for Dazed and Confused, 1980 for Everybody Wants Some.
This means he inevitably injects a large degree of autobiography into his work. Dazed and Confused was loosely inspired by his own fraught high school experience, functioning as his effort to exorcise some lingering demons from his teenage years. Now Everybody Wants Some is is his unabashed ode to how much fun he had playing baseball at Sam Houston State University in the early 80s.
Years before the McConaissance there was simply, “Oh, who’s that? He’s gorgeous.”
Be prepared to say the same thing about Everybody Wants Some’s parade of potential McConaugheys
However, Everybody Wants Some is also Linklater’s attempt to put an exclamation point at the end of the thought he started with Boyhood. That movie was all about the process of growing up, and ended with the boy leaving for college and meeting a girl. Everybody Wants Some is about the weekend right before college starts, and the closet thing it has to a plot is a freshman boy adjusts to his new surroundings and meets a girl (Zoey Deutch, who had me thinking she was Isla Fisher’s clone the entire time).
What I admire about Everybody Wants Some is the way it gradually reveals its true purpose, which is not actually to be Porkies – The College Years but instead an insightful reflection on the transformative transition from high school to college to adulthood. Of course, not all of the characters are in the same place in their journey. In addition to Jake and Finnegan, there’s a mixture of younger and older students on the team who are always around but don’t particularly stand out dramatically, usually best remembered as “the one with the muscles,” “the one with the weird mustache”, “the young one who can barely grow a mustache,” “the black one,” etc. As such, the story always circles back to Jake, and as Linklater told TheWeek:
“It’s about identity. It’s about what to do with the freedom you’ve been given in life. You’re not really a free agent in this world until you leave your parents’ house, high school, and all that. So developmentally, [college is] a really important time. It’s not put to you that way, but it strikes me as figuring out who you are, and kind of accepting your life as your own.”
This is when these people get to decide who they really are going to be, and the overwhelming number of choices in front of them is perfectly embodied in the rotating nature of the clubs and parties they attend. On the first night, they hit up a disco club where they can party (and score easy chicks) like Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights:
Remember Urban Cowboy? That movie perfectly reflected an early-80s social trend, one which we tend to forget about
Then the next night they end up at a punk rock show, with some proving better than others at fitting in. Finally, they crash a drama club party, and awkwardly mingle with supremely open-minded, borderline hippie girls who probably have no idea what it means when the guys bring up baseball and say things like “He’s so good he’s like a vaccuum cleaner at third base.”
It’s sort of a shame that Linklater doesn’t completely trust the audience to pick up on what he’s doing, thus giving Jake and Finnegan dialog from the sidelines of the punk rock show to spell it all out for us, with Jake questioning the validity of constantly changing who they are just to impress girls and Finnegan arguing they are simply adapting to their surroundings and broadening their horizons.
However, that momentary bit of slightly heavy-handed scripting is not why I hated watching this movie. Far from it, really. No, that can be summed up in this fear Linklater expressed to ConsequenceOfSound when discussing a note he received from the studio to cut down an early scene featuring the guys driving around town and singing along to Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”
“The note was like, ‘You could cut that in half”. I was like, ‘No, you don’t get it. If you don’t like that, you’re not going to like this.’ If you don’t like hanging out with these guys, you might hate this movie.”
There’s the rub: I absolutely did not like hanging out with these guys. I did not care if wide-eyed Jake ever hooked up with or, far more scandalously, formed an actual emotional connection with the auburn-haired girl (he finally learns her first name maybe an hour and twenty minutes into this two hour movie). I wasn’t particularly moved by the plight of a bunch of big fish from small ponds either floundering in self-delusion (i.e., assuming they’ll be drafted by a MLB team even though they’re clearly not good enough) or choosing to embrace whatever life throws at them, partially because that’s a central dilemma affecting all of them but maybe only two of the characters seem to be aware of it.
Once Linklater reveals what the movie is really about, I was beyond tired of spending time with these guys. I was reminded of Mark Kermode’s rant about The Wolf of Wall Street:
Can you be dramatically interested in a character that you just hate? I think this is where the film falls down. If there isn’t a way into the character you just wonder, “Why am I spending so much time in their company?” when I actually don’t care what happens to them. As soon as you stop caring, or as soon as you start not caring because there’s no point at which you think “I actually care what happens to you” the film itself starts to become something of an ordeal.
I recognize that to, in any way, equate the Everybody Wants Some guys to Jordan Belfort (the detestable real-life figure DiCaprio plays in Wolf) is a categorically unfair and false comparison. These guys are pretty much just behaving like frat guys, with their fraternity being the baseball team, whereas Belfort lived up to every possible stereotype of 80s amorality and excess. I most definitely wouldn’t say I hated these guys; I just grew tired of being around them, much as I did with Belfort when I reached the halfway point of Wolf of Wall Street. I was numb to everything and just wanted it to end, and that’s how I felt about Everybody Wants Some.
THE BOTTOM LINE
What’s my problem, right? Everybody loves Everybody Wants Some. It’s so nostalgic, and the period music is so much fun. Plus, come one, it’s just guys being guys. Sure, they endlessly bust each other’s balls, but they’re also toughening each other up in the process and leaning on a leader who occasionally reveals a nuanced view of their gendered and tribal behavior. It’s all remarkably authentic, as in this is exactly how you’d imagine these people behaving at that particular moment in history. But, wow, I absolutely couldn’t wait for it to be over.
ROTTENTOMATOES CONSENSUS
88% – “Nostalgic in the best sense, Everybody Wants Some!! finds Richard Linklater ambling through the past with a talented cast, a sweetly meandering story, and a killer classic rock soundtrack.”