Olivia Wilde's (yes, actress Olivia Wilde directs this film) Booksmart is doomed to be compared to 2007's Superbad. To be fair, the films share some pretty substantial similarities: both films depict two ride-or-die buds trying to make it to a big party during their senior year of high school; both films have a scene of a drunk person vomiting on/near their make-out partner; both films feature a high school party broken up by the cops; and both films share a sibling: Beanie Feldstein, who plays control-freak valedictorian Molly in Booksmart is Jonah Hill's younger sister.
But Booksmart has new life breathed into it. It is woker, gayer, and Gen-Zer-er than its predecessor. Gone is the homosexual panic and casual misogyny of Jonah Hill's Seth and Michael Cera's Evan and replacing it is a queer female main character (Kaitlyn Dever's Amy) who, by the way, is spending a gap year in Africa helping women make tampons, and a plus-size (which is never remarked on) female main character (Feldstein's Molly) who is bossy, whip-smart, and has a framed photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her bedroom.
But perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of Booksmart is the crucial scene on which the entire plot hinges: Molly is in a gender neutral bathroom listening to a couple fellow students right outside the stalls discuss how she is annoying and condescending. She comes out of the bathroom to confront them, rubbing her acceptance to Yale in their faces, assuming they--who have partied and goofed around the last four years--are far less successful than she. As it turns out, they too are accepted into Ivy League schools (except for the dude who got recruited to code for Google and was offered a six-figure salary right out of high school). Molly is, as the kids say, shook. She realizes in that moment how foolish she and Amy have been: they avoided partying and studied hard, assuming that because they are disciplined, they will come out much further ahead than their classmates. But, as one of Molly's tormenters says to her with a sneer, "Oh, we care about school. We don't just care about school."
This scene, which upends a huge high school movie trope that pits nerds against cool kids, is pretty great. It's rare to see a smart girl realize that maybe she actually doesn't know everything and has room to improve. Of course, instead of internalizing this information and using it to fuel empathy for others and herself, Molly's solution is to convince her more introverted buddy to party their fucking asses off on the last day of school so that they can say that, yes, the *technically* both partied AND studied in high school. Technically. Additionally, Molly wants Amy to hook up with Ryan, a skater girl whom Amy has a crush on. And Molly just might have a crush of her own, which she is too proud to reveal.
The movie mostly focuses on Amy and Molly's attempts to make it to a party thrown by Nick, a hot popular dude and the class vice president (of course, Molly is the class president). But since the two girls never socialized with any of their peers, they don't know the address and have to endure two additional parties in their quest to find Nick's party.
At heart, Booksmart, like Superbad, is about friendship. The relationship between Amy and Molly is not so different from Seth and Evan's. Amy is the more passive friend (like Evan) and Molly is the bossier, more aggressive one (like Seth). As a former (still??) bossy girl who borderline bullied some of my friends growing up, I felt a kinship to Molly. You rarely see a character like her--and even more rarely are you encouraged to empathize with a character like her. But her story arc is so real. Behind her driven, ambitious nature is a real fear of her peers and of not being good enough. So when her "thing" (being smart and successful) is basically revealed to be everyone's thing since many of her "slacker" peers turn out to also be successful and smart, her mind is blown and her armor has to come off if she wants to grow as a person.
Booksmart is wickedly hilarious and features some truly weird scenes (inadvertent drug ingestion leads to an animated hallucination scene) and lots of cameos from funny folks such as Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte. The best part is the all the different "types" of high school kids--the gay, flamboyant theatre people, the rich weirdos, the cool teacher, the stoners--all get mixed together into a really nice soup of humanity at the various parties. Rivals and allies change throughout the evening, so that even though there is plenty of conflict, it never feels like a tired "nerds vs. jocks" cliche.
Grade: B+
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