Spiritual 鈥楧azed鈥 sequel profound
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EVERYBODY Wants Some!!” is Richard Linklater’s self-described spiritual sequel to “Dazed and Confused,” and, somewhat miraculously, the spirit has remained intact.
It’s been 13 years from one to the other: long enough to literally watch a boy grow up. But between the 1970s high-school graduation of “Dazed” and the first college days of the 1980-set “Everybody Wants Some!!,” it feels like hardly a summer has passed. We left off with Foghat’s “Slow Ride”; we pick up with the Knack’s “My Sharona.”
The song’s thumping bass, which opens the film, is an early signal of the exuberance to come in “Everybody Wants Some!!,” Linklater’s marvelously loose and affectionately antic portrait of college life. It’s a chapter that Linklater’s “Boyhood” never got to. But it’s rendered here with the same attention to the rhythms of youth and the in-between moments the director has long been drawn to.
But unlike “Boyhood,” it also has bong hits, disco dancing and sex — lots of it. It’s a laid back “Animal House,” with shots of philosophy mixed in.
Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) is a freshman baseball pitcher who arrives in September 1980 at Southeast Texas University, where he moves in with his future teammates and fraternity brothers. Bros are not the most loved of college types, but Linklater’s frat guys, aside from being competitive, womanizing boozehounds, are mostly clever, curious and likable.
Linklater has assembled a strong ensemble of young, promising actors. They include the mustachioed Glenn (Tyler Hoechlin), the philosophizing chatterbox Finn (a tremendous Glen Powell) and the bearded stoner, Willoughby (Wyatt Russell). Jake easily and confidently joins them as they bounce from nightclub to nightclub, and prowl the parking lots for women.
The guys of the movie are all eagerness and appetite, with their lives ahead of them. Though the team is nationally ranked and they take their sport seriously, professional baseball is largely an acknowledged pipe dream. Besides, there’s so much more to be excited about. Every night is a different club. Books and records are passed around like joints.
A countdown to the start of classes runs throughout, but not in a foreboding way. Out of the aimlessness, a sense of purpose is growing. The world is opening up to Jake, who begins dating a theater student (Zoey Deutch).
By focusing on baseball players, Linklater has given a far tenderer, more dynamic (and largely true) picture of young male athletes than they are usually afforded. But he’s also limited his canvas compared to the more varied, crisscrossing teens of “Dazed.” And while the sunny and sure Jenner is winning, he’s maybe too much so. “Dazed and Confused” took its center from Wiley Wiggins’ timid teen, but the Jake of “Everybody Wants Some!!” has no anxieties to overcome; his first blush with college life is a home run.
Like many of Linklater’s films, “Everybody Wants Some!!” radiates something both slight and profound. In the immortal words of David Lee Roth, “Everybody wants some. Baby, how ‘bout you?”
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