Booksmart & The Push and Pull of the High School Movie by Craig Hammill

Olivia Wilde’s 2019 Booksmart stars Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein as high school seniors and best friends Amy and Molly. It’s the night before graduation and they’ve played by the rules, overachieved, gotten into great colleges, only to discover many others did too. . .yet still had fun.  To make up for lost time, they work to pack an entire missed teenage wildlife into one night. 

Adventures, hijinks, romances, mishaps, realizations all ensue.

The story, tone, and approach all embrace the “one day” high school movie subgenere that includes George Lucas’s American Graffiti, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, and Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan's Superbad. 

The key distinction is that it foregrounds female best friends, LGBTQ relationships, and current teen issues (including being a teenager during the Trump presidency) in a way very few, if any, movies did before it.

What’s so fascinating when you watch the movie is both how innovative and topical yet traditional the movie is.

Amy, our shy, introverted, cautious co-lead, is also a lesbian who came out to her (mostly) accepting parents (wonderfully played by Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) as a sophomore.

The movie charts Amy’s nocturnal adventure – her crush on fellow seemingly non-binary senior skateboarder Ryan, realizations, heartbreaks and hook ups – with the same cinematic commitment that male characters like Richard Dreyfuss’s Curt in 1973’s American Graffiti and Jonah Hill’s and Michael Cera’s Seth and Evan in 2007’s Superbad got in their heterosexual pursuit of female crushes.

And that feels like the point. Amy’s adventure should be no different than the genre’s traditional male teen pursuit of a female teen crush. Rather than underline the distinction in bright yellow highlighter or make a point of its “specialness”, Wilde and her performers treat it with the same comedic humanism any heterosexual storyline in the past would have been afforded.

The movie also slyly subverts our expectation that Amy and her Type A best friend Molly (Beanie Feldstein) might end up discovering they love each other. They do of course.  . .but as best friends. Molly is revealed to be very heterosexual and harboring a secret crush on her co-student council Vice President Nick. This is a surprise to us because Nick is clearly the “popular doofus” and Molly has spent a good part of the movie railing against the popular doofuses. So it’s quite good writing (and actually fairly insightful) that she reveals she actually lusts after one of them.

At the same time that Booksmart commendably makes a raucous R-rated high school comedy that commits the surprisingly revolutionary act of giving its female leads all the foibles, sexual desires, adventures, catharses, previously often just reserved for male characters, it also interestingly traffics in a lot of the genre’s strange cliches.

For some reason, the house parties in these movies always seem to be at five million dollar mansions with the parents away. And even though Booksmart acknowledges some of the class distinctions between our leads and the teens with money – Molly gets picked up at her apartment & one very funny sister and brother, Gigi and Jared, are so rich they try to buy popularity by throwing a counterparty on a yacht only a billionaire could afford – it can’t really escape the gravity of its embrace of the cliche.

The movie veers into fantasyland a few times as when it plays for out and out comedy a (truly funny) scene between Amy and Molly and what turns out to be a serial killer pizza delivery guy. The scene works. It provides a plot point for the third act. And the movie is clear from the beginning that its intentions are to be big, bold, comedic, outlandish, enjoyable, and fun. 

Still, in defense of the movie, I’m sure weirder things have happened in real life.

Also, while the movie’s LGBTQ sensitivity is some of the most enlightened and progressive ever put in a high school comedy, there are still questionable decisions to emphasize stereotypes when it comes to the gay male teen characters that teeter on “laughing at” rather than “laughing with”.  

This Programmer winced that it was the black gay male character who gets put in drag in the middle of the movie; the “black man in drag” trope is a stereotype many black comedians and performers have objected to but routinely seems to get ignored by white filmmakers.

This isn’t to nitpick because the movie is a ton of fun and a success on almost all levels. And its heart is also clearly with everyone.  

Also, as a total sidenote, the movie has an incredible shot late in the game where Amy and Molly get into a huge argument at the main party. It is played as a “oner” (no cuts) and while they argue, we slowly see all the out of focus teens behind them turning on their camera phones and flashes to record it. Pinpricks of light pop up in the background as the argument heats up.

It’s a great shot and tells a huge moment of the story in wonderfully cinematic language.

The great achievement of Booksmart in the final analysis may be this duality. It manages to be very of the moment and forward thinking at the same time that it fully and deliriously embraces the ridiculous cliches of many high school movie entertainments. It has its cake and eats it too.

This middle aged Programmer also found himself going to Spotify to listen to some of the great needle drops in the movie including the DJ Shadow “theme song” for all intents and purposes: Nobody Speak. Which I’m sure everyone younger than me has known about forever.

Movies have always been as much a reflection or even projection of the trajectory of the culture as any other art form. Movies like Booksmart show that that conversation is alive and healthy and there for those if they want to engage in it.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.