Booksmart, Olivia Wilde’s raucous new comedy, is one of the funniest movies in ages, a high school buddy picture for right now, a showcase for two terrific young actresses and a laugh machine that takes off like a shot and hurtles ahead, three jokes per minute, for 102 solid. It’s also sweet and affirming and a breakout vehicle for young star Beanie Feldstein, whose inspired work here affirms her arrival as The Next Great Thing. Ditto the film’s first-time director.
Actress turned filmmaker Wilde, helmer of short films, music videos and collaborator in a string of socially conscious documentaries, has made an impressively assured debut feature about that “ride or die” soul mate and high school bestie, the one who gets you, feels you, needs you—but with whom you inevitably, bittersweetly, must part. Inclusive, hilarious, raunchy and big-hearted, Wilde set out to make a generational classic on the order of American Graffiti or The Breakfast Club, and Booksmart can proudly stand, with honors, in such company.
Picture opens in Los Angeles with the galvanic Feldstein (Lady Bird, Broadway’s Hello Dolly) and co-star Katilyn Dever (Short-Term 12 and Men, Women and Children) as best girlfriends Molly and Amy, the smartest girls in their class who, on the eve of graduation, are feeling proud. In a movie too smart to stereotype them as geeky bookworms (they aspire to be the next RBG and do global service work in Uganda, not treated as a joke) are not outcast (rather, somewhat deliberately separatist) and while they may not be in the hip crowd, no matter—they’ve got SAT cred.
Comically strident in their academic superiority (and with Yale and Columbia acceptances to boot), Molly is shocked to learn that those they most look down on—partiers, theater geeks, skaters—are also headed to the Ivy League (one even bypassing university for six figure gig at Google). But how? How could they have studied that hard…and had fun?
Then, a revelation—no more missing out. What good was all that studying anyway if you haven’t gotten any life experience? And what better way to play catch up than to pack four years of missed social opportunities into an endless night of partying? If you’ve seen Superbad (a distant cousin to this picture) you know how these things can, and usually do, go: an all-nighter of ribald, hedonistic indulgence is in order.
So begins a comic odyssey that plays like a teenaged After Hours, the pair dressed in matching, Rosie the Riveter jumpsuits, quickly ditching Amy’s parents (Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, who suspect the girls a couple) with a pair of dual conquests in their sights: Amy, infatuated with an is-she-or-isn’t-she skater girl (novice Victoria Ruesga, charming), sets out to discover if they play on the same team. And Molly’s big crush—the in-crowd, bleached blond Jared (Mason Gooding), who may, or may not, feel the same. This all leads to a big party, naturally, at a hidden address.
Wilde impressively shuttles the picture from one location and set-piece to another—from a misconceived yacht soiree to an over-the-top murder mystery to a hilarious drug trip involving Barbie surrogates that must be seen to be believed—and the stakes keep getting raised, farcically and emotionally. A botched sex scene, an arrest and a joke about a stuffed animal and masturbation are belly laugh funny.
In addition to the leads, the other standout in the cast is Bille Lourd (American Horror Story) as flamboyant friend Gigi, who is comically on point throughout, turning up at random in most of the movie’s episodic sequences, at times an outlandishly theatrical wingman and others a caring, supportive listener. Hers is a lovely performance and a real coming out from under her rep as Carrie Fisher’s daughter.
Two other cast members deserve mention—Jason Sudeikis as the high school principal moonlighting as an Uber driver, who gets one of the movie’s great jokes (“Was that Cardi B?”), and Jessica Williams, as a too hip teacher who finds herself—or rather, places herself—in the middle of the shenanigans. She has a pair of scenes that are so funny—one explaining a “dark” time at Jamba Juice and another of mistaken identity—she steals every moment onscreen.
The two stars, who were roomies during filming and became fast friends, have an obvious chemistry and finish-each-other’s-sentences symbiosis that effectively sells their onscreen friendship; we believe their jokes, their hijinks and a big, late picture blow-out argument. There is real love between them, but never without humor, right to their final scene.
While the movie I’ve described might sound like garden variety, movie male pratfalls (in which the loss of virginity is the usual rite of passage), but the difference here is that the objects of the girls’ affections neither define their quests nor identities. And that’s because Booksmart was largely made by women who directed, produced and wrote the screenplay, with its fine ear for how teen girls relate to each other, and it makes all the difference in getting inside the dynamics of both young women, and their special relationship.
Booksmart is a distinctly contemporary comedy, its characters not defined by a need to be accepted by the cool crowd, not in search of dreamboat, romantic fulfillment and not out to lose their virginity (but hey, if it happens, it happens). Wilde and company dig deeper, excavating the emotional beats between girls that are largely ignored in mainstream movies, which tend to look at all women from the outside in. Often, even in seminal movies like Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl and John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles, young women are merely looking for the right guy. And that was fine, then. But today that is neither reality nor a narrative worth perpetuating.
Instead, we get two smart women who learn something important—that preconceived notions of others do no one any good, and the idea of inclusion, which we hear a lot about today, is talk that must be walked. There are numerous LGBTQ+ characters in Booksmart, and the movie progressively understands that there is no need for a coming out story for any of them. Brightest among them may be Noah Galvin as the theater kid who is just simply who he is: wicked funny, a little too much and a mean karaoke machine when it comes to Alanis Morrisette’s You Oughta Know, one of the movie’s real joys.
There are scores of teenage movies each year but very few truly about teenagers, or the teen experience. Most of them have all the right moves but few insights—for every Lady Bird we get two like F*&% the Prom, the kind which flood streaming services. Many trade on hip coolness, but few illuminate the thorny precipice to adulthood with the insight of say, The Perks of Being a Wallflower or Eighth Grade.
Booksmart ranks with the best of them—a flawless film about teen girls and as inspired a comedy as we’ve seen in memory. Hilarious, wistful, straight and true, it’s an instant all-timer.
4 stars.
