Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart, which premiered at South by Southwest last night to a wave of glowing notices and now has a newly unveiled trailer, is not your run-of-the-mill coming-of-age picture.
For starters, the comedy trades the dudes that usually share the buddy-buddy dynamic fueling such a film for the duo of Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein (who movie lovers may recognize from Neighbors 2 or Lady Bird, the film this one is destined to be compared to for the rest of time).
They’re far from a couple of fun-loving slackers, too, having filled their high school careers with extracurriculars and dutiful studying to land an acceptance letter to their dream colleges. Imagine their horror when they discover that their peers who spent the past four years getting really good at imbibing and sex also managed admission to Ivy League — some sorely overdue debauchery is in order.
There’s one more wrinkle to the formula; Dever’s overachieving Amy has the hots for a skater girl in their grade rather than the jock du jour. On the girls’ big night of misbehavior, she’ll get in touch with her long-dormant libido while Feldstein’s fanny-pack-clad Molly gets into trouble all her own.
Even with these deviations from formula, the trailer hits all the beats that make movies in this subgenre such reliable crowd-pleasers: a bit of chemically-altered fun, a wry run-in with the cops, and the obligatory heart-to-heart about how much these two friends mean to one another. A new generation awaits its nose boop.
Booksmart comes to theaters in the US on 24 May, and then the UK on 27 May.
Published 11 Mar 2019
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