Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin and Ryan Guzman in Everybody Wants Some!!
Richard Linklater’s most personal films are inevitably about time, its passing and the desire to freeze it. Everybody Wants Some!!, his shaggy college baseball comedy that’s not about baseball at all, is another prime example of this.
It begins at a Texas college on a Thursday in 1980, with the first day of classes beginning the following Monday. The next two hours of screen time will chart the half-baked hangouts, sexual conquests and primordial competitions of the university’s talented hitters, fielders and hurlers over the course of four lazy days and debauched nights. It’s a period of pre-college bliss that seems to exist out of time, a lost weekend of no rules — a feeling of liberated euphoria that also applies to Linklater’s script and direction.
Our conduit into the exciting new world of college is incoming freshman Jake (Blake Jenner), a star high-school pitcher arriving at his team’s exclusive off-campus house with a turntable, a crate of post-punk records and not much else. He might as well be Wiley Wiggins’ Mitch Kramer in Dazed & Confused or Ellar Coltrane’s Mason Evans Jr. in Boyhood: a relatable everyboy embarking on ritualistic rites of passage.
Nothing of much import happens in Everybody Wants Some!!, because it doesn’t need to. Proudly eschewing plot, conflict and a three-act structure, the movie is allowed to just be and learn and, like Jake, find itself in a new environment. He meets teammates like the fiercely competitive Glen McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), the hilariously slow-witted Kenny Roeper (Ryan Guzman), the pot-headed left-wing mystic Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the corn-fed hayseed Billy Autrey (Will Brittain) and the pathologically unhinged Niles (Juston Street). If there’s only one black kid on the team, well … this was Texas in 1980.
They’re jocks, but many have brains, too. They read Carl Sagan and Kerouac, and they, too, are unconsciously questing for self-actualization during the four years many of us find it. They play ping-pong with the competitive zeal of Sampras and Agassi in a Wimbledon final, enjoy magnificent bong hits while discussing telepathy and corporate hegemony, and try to score chicks at venues as varied as a discotheque, a country-western bar and a punk club. They’re rebuffed often, but not always: Girls, finally unshackled from suburban homes, are happy to experiment as well.
Seemingly directionless scenes of idle camaraderie sprawl on for far longer than almost any filmmaker would let them, but they never begin to wither on the vine, thanks to the expertly cast, star-free ensemble’s flawless synergy. The illusion of improvisation is a key component of Linklater’s work, and Everybody Wants Some!! is elegantly loose-limbed, its screenplay disappearing in the ether of verisimilitude.
And yet it’s very much there. Every time the byzantine chatter wanders into subjects of Greek mythology, superstition and probability, or when Jake outwardly vocalizes, at the fish-out-of-water punk show, that, “it begs the question about who we really are,” Linklater imbues his meandering dialogue with sly philosophical heft.
Linklater has spoken of Everybody Wants Some!! as a spiritual sequel to Boyhood, because it picks up where that film left off: the frontier of college life. But it’s doubtful this new film would retain its charms if it were set in present day. Its props and production design revel in the nostalgia of the era, from the regrettable hairdos and loud clothing to the waterbeds, thick corded telephones, primitive arcade games, fastidiously labeled VHS recordings of every Twilight Zone episode, and communal car-ride sing-alongs to “Rapper’s Delight.”
Part of the reason I never wanted Everybody Wants Some!! to end is because I wanted to preserve that ambience: pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan, pre-Iraq War, pre-cellphones, pre-computers. To meet girls, there was no Tinder swiping, just in-person pickup lines, each one an opportunity for growth. The connections and friendships and rivalries that develop over the course of this movie probably wouldn’t happen today, because we’re far too beholden to our screens.
Was this era better than ours? Objectively, perhaps not, but sentimentally, Linklater persuades us that it was. He earns those exclamation marks.
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! Director: Richard Linklater; Cast: Blake Jenner, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Glen Powell, Zoey Deutch, Wyatt Russell, Will Brittain, Temple Baker, Austin Amelio, Juston Street; Distributor: Paramount; Rating: R; Opens: Today