Linklater's Everybody Wants Some Is a Deep, Funny Ode to College Boyhood

Certain things are expected of a film that takes its name from a Van Halen Song.
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Certain things are expected of a film that takes its name from a Van Halen song: gallons of beer, epic bong rips, silly frat-house shenanigans, sillier '80s hair, and sexual dalliances fueled by hormones in overdrive. There are also certain things you'd expect to see in a Richard Linklater film: romance, bittersweet nostalgia, and wise-beyond-their-years young people breezily riffing on the meaning of human existence. Everybody Wants Some, which premiered at SXSW and opens nationwide next month, delivers on these twin promises of debauchery and ennui—and does so with gusto.

Everybody Wants Some is Linklater's eighteenth feature film, and his first since 2014's Oscar-nominated Boyhood. It has a little bit in common with Boyhood, in that the story begins with its main character arriving at college and meeting the men (and, yes, women) who will accompany him on his first stumbles into adult life. This is right where Boyhood ended. But given the pace, tone, ensemble chemistry, and consumption of intoxicants, the movie possesses less kinship with Boyhood and instead has more in common with Linklater's 1993 film, Dazed and Confused. Fans of that modern classic will find a lot to love here. Everybody Wants Some is not a sequel necessarily, nor is it the same script dusted off and rewritten for 1980 instead of 1976. But Dazed and EWS are thoroughly of the same universe: Texas in the summertime, muscle cars, tight jeans, Lone Star beer, sketchy facial hair, rock and roll, and baseball.

Yes, baseball. The main characters are all members of their unnamed university's baseball team. The dozen or so men all live together in their off-campus housing, and when they're not busy getting blotto, they're rousting the freshman and fiercely competing with one another in leisure activities. Games of ping pong explode in violence. Foosball matches end in shouting. Rounds of knuckles cause permanent scarring. The film closely observes this hyper-competitive dynamic among the teammates; every night out, every lazy afternoon, and even a swim in the river are fueled with an edgy undercurrent of one-upmanship. It's this tension that drives much of the plot's development. As we watch the boys posture and bump up against each other's egos, we can feel lifelong friendships forming.

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The strongest bond, and the one that centers the film, is between the main character Jake (Blake Jenner) and the older and wiser Finnegan (Glen Powell). Jake is a freshman, a sweet and gentle guy who was a star pitcher at his high school. He rolls up in his Olds 442 and marches onto the team ready to impress with his talents, only to discover that each of his teammates were the best players at their high schools too. His past accomplishments hold little currency on the roster of a college state champion baseball team, so he's forced to reset his compass. The friendly and affable Finn, the closest thing this group of jocks has to a leader, helps Jake navigate the situation.

The ensemble cast is bursting with charismatic young actors. Jenner and Powell are magnetic. Tyler Hoechlin as arrogant hotshot McReynolds prowls around his scenes like a panther. Wyatt Russell as pitcher and ur-stoner Willoughby has some of the film's best lines. Juston Street, as Niles, is the film's clown, a towering, pumped-up fount of comically bad vibes.

Everybody Wants Some plays with time, a common thread in Linklater's work. Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and Slacker all take place within a single a day. Boyhood and the Before trilogy follow the same characters through many years. This new movie takes place entirely in a weekend. And not just any weekend, but the first weekend of college, where you're new and your friends are new and every experience is a first. It's a time for discovery and invention. That buzzy energy seeps into every scene, keeping the film bouncing along merrily. Linklater, who writes and directs, puts his familiar existential angst on the back burner this time around. There's a little soul-searching, sure, and a soliloquy or two. But mostly he just wants to keep us laughing.

The movie's filled with laughs, some of them colliding with cringes. One thing that's mostly absent, however, is women. Linklater has put numerous smart and powerfully written female characters in his films, from Julie Delpy's Céline to half the cast of Dazed. There are many women in EWS, but only one who feels like more than just a sketch. Zoey Deutch plays Beverly, Jake's sweetheart, a drama major with a Joni Mitchell poster over her bed; she's sweet and intelligent and, like, really deep, you know? But by and large, this is a dude movie. A fun, irreverent, and downright hilarious one.