Writer-director Richard Linklater has dubbed Everybody Wants Some!! the “spiritual sequel” to his Dazed and Confused. But that’s not technically true. Dazed and Confused was democratic in its approach to the last day of high school in 1976 Texas: It showed us the swaggering jocks, the brains, the shy freshmen, the stoners. Its inclusiveness, its remarkable empathy for all those high school subsets—male and female—was what made it so special.
Everybody Wants Some!!, on the other hand, is laser focused on those swaggering jocks. And by all reasonable measurements, it shouldn’t work. For starters, its lead character Jake (Blake Jenner), a standout high school pitcher, is a good-looking, popular, well-adjusted kid. In most other youth culture films, he’d be the villain, or at least the unattainable object of desire for our outsider hero. But while Jake might be a little more sensitive than your average jock, he doesn’t secretly want to write poetry or dance. He’s happy with who he is. (Not coincidentally, Linklater—perhaps our most autobiographical of filmmakers—also played baseball in high school and college.)
It’s 1980 and Blake has just arrived at the off-campus housing for the baseball team at an unnamed Texas college. It’s a week before classes start and the house is already trashed (partly due to an ill-advised attempt at inflating a waterbed). We quickly meet his teammates: There’s hyper competitive team leader McReynolds (Tyler Hoehclin), stoner philosopher Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), garrulous ladies man Finn (Glen Powell), unhinged hurler Jay (Juston Street), and affable Dale (J. Quinton Johnson), among others. McReynolds immediately tells Jake that he hates pitchers, but Jake is unfazed by this. He’s been around jocks before—he knows that good-naturedly giving each other shit is all part of the dynamic.
Jake is not going on any classic hero’s journey in this film. He has no character arc to speak of. He’s a little nervous about going from Big Man on Campus to lowest rung on the college totem pole, but it’s not exactly eating away at him. While his teammates are all horndogs, happy to go anywhere that might procure a date for the evening, Jake eventually sets his sights on one girl, theater major Beverly (Zoey Deutch), which makes him the soul of romanticism, relatively speaking. For most of the film, the guys hang out, go to parties and clubs (it being 1980—disco, country, early rap, and New Wave/punk are all factored in), get drunk, cruise around campus looking for girls, crack wise, play hyper competitive games of ping-pong and some sort of medieval torture contest known as knuckle flicking, and…that’s it.
The fact that Everybody Wants Some!! does work, quite wonderfully, is a near miracle. It’s partly because it has such a specific sense of place—you can practically smell the stale beer, cheap cologne, and gym socks. And partly because these guys—dammit—are simply fun to hang out with. Linklater has audaciously made a movie about our most maligned subset of young men—bros—and forced us to admit that we actually like them.