Everybody Wants Some!!

Synopsis: It’s 1980 and freshman Jake (Blake Jenner) arrives at a small Texas college to take his place on the baseball team and he is quickly caught up in the party life of the frat house where the entire squad lives.

Everybody Wants Some!! is being promoted as a "spiritual sequel" to the director’s  much-loved 1993 teen film Dazed and Confused. Not being impressed by that film I wasn’t too chuffed at the prospect of a re-visitation but Richard Linklater has since then proven himself to be a director worth watching. So I did. And yes, the underlying form and over-arching frame of reference is recognizable but with a richer script and a bigger budget retro production design this is a better film. Its cavalcade of familiar chart-topping hits notwithstanding it is however, similarly to its predecessor, grounded in a very specifically American phenomenon, college life.

Once again Linklater’s film is largely plotless and follows the escapades of a bunch of guys over the few days between their arrival on campus and the start of the academic year.  The sports scholarship, the frat house and baseball are virtually unknown outside the USA so the take-home value here is really the re-creation of 1980 and in this respect the film, which kicks off to the beat of The Knack’s “My Sharona” and keeps the party going until closing with The Cars’ “Let The Good Times Roll”, is a winner. If you can’t get enough of butt-hugging shorts, knee-high socks, pornstar mo’s, blow-waved hair, halter tops and bell bottoms you’ll be well pleased.

Recreating a time and place is really what Linklater is about and bar a minor thread about the blossoming relationship between Jake and a cute drama major, Beverly (Zoey Deutch), unlike Jean-Marc Vallée's superior retro-pop drama C.R.A.Z.Y., there is little in the way of story or depth of character.  And, somewhat oddly, most of the male cast are way too old to be playing college students with even the relatively young-looking Jenner being in actuality 24 years old.

Although more engaging than its progenitor, Everybody Wants Some!! Is still of limited appeal and unless you happen to be fan of that film or wish it was 1980 in middle America again, there are probably better choices for your movie-going dollar.  

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