Every­body Wants Some!!

What a beau­ti­ful notion it is that peo­ple can look up into the night sky and form pic­tures by join­ing togeth­er the stars. The kids these days are call­ing them con­stel­la­tions, but the process of train­ing focus on the boun­ty of nature and forg­ing an art­work in the mind is rather a cin­e­mat­ic ges­ture. The fact that Ursa Minor looks noth­ing like a lit­tle bear, or The Big Dip­per bares scant resem­blance to what­ev­er a big dip­per is sup­posed to be, is moot. They’re basic for­ma­tions around which we can men­tal­ly impose an image, just as movies – espe­cial­ly good movies – are pack­ages of infor­ma­tion to inter­pret, expand upon and unpack. What we look at and what we see are often two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent things.

The stars fea­ture heav­i­ly in Richard Linklater’s sweet, salty and soul­ful new film, Every­body Wants Some!!. The writer/​director has called it the ​“spir­i­tu­al sequel” to his icon­ic 1993 par­ty movie, Dazed and Con­fused, and it cer­tain­ly fits the high­fa­lutin bill. As with that and so many of Linklater’s oth­er decep­tive­ly ram­bling films, this new one offers the view­er a bunch of things that hap­pen over a peri­od of time, some of which might have life-alter­ing con­no­ta­tions, oth­ers just expe­ri­en­tial flot­sam that got lodged in the director’s mem­o­ry banks. You can make of them what you will. For your lis­ten­ing plea­sure is a wel­come mix of alt rock, hair met­al and a lip-synced ver­sion of ​‘Rapper’s Delight’.

Every­body Wants Some!! takes place over a long week­end in 1980, chron­i­cling the booze-fuelled mon­keyshines of a fra­ter­ni­ty house filled with base­ball schol­ars who are count­ing down to the start of the new semes­ter. Decked out in ball-hug­ging slacks and bicep-bran­dish­ing tees, the mot­ley crew daisy chain togeth­er var­i­ous leisure activ­i­ties, the bond­ing expe­ri­ence more of an excuse than the sin­cere foun­da­tion of their antics. They talk, they drink, they spin records, they smooch with girls, they ride mat­tress­es down a stair­case and get into all man­ner of vio­lent bar­room sports con­tests. Their all-Amer­i­can dude­bro inti­ma­cy and colour­ful pat­ter makes them feel like they’ve been air-lift­ed in from a Viet­nam war movie. Or maybe this is Linklater’s answer to Avengers Assemble?

Although par­ties make up much of the plot, they are details more than the cen­tral sub­ject. In Dazed and Con­fused the cli­mac­tic shindig acts as a cat­a­lyst for all the small, per­son­al dra­mas. Here, they’re a hotbed of friv­o­lous fun, an out­let for more base expres­sions, such as mud wrestling. If the stars are pris­tine and finite, these are the super­novas – glo­ri­ous to observe, but only from a safe distance.

Talk­ing of stars, they make their first appear­ance in the Shake­speare­an sense as our hyper-mel­low hero, Jake (Blake Jen­ner), is spot­ted in the back seat of a car by Zoey Deutch’s dra­ma sopho­more, Bev­er­ly. Though the two don’t actu­al­ly speak, he makes a men­tal note of where she lives, deflect­ing the joc­u­lar taunts of his house­mates to watch which dorm room she enters. The pair don’t meet again until much lat­er in the film, but their paths have crossed and their fate is sealed.

There’s a moment lat­er in the film where Glen Powell’s mous­ta­chioed cad, Finnegan, attempts to flirt with a girl by pre­tend­ing he’s deeply inter­est­ed in astrol­o­gy. His prey almost doesn’t see through him, but pry­ing ears enquire as to why he’s cho­sen to shelve his cus­tom­ary, groin-based pick-up line. Maybe this is Lin­klater say­ing that we should look to the stars for images, but not for mean­ing. And espe­cial­ly not par­lay that mean­ing into a phoney confessional.

The base­ball dia­mond itself is the final con­stel­la­tion – the immov­able grid through which balls and bod­ies fly. Every­body Wants Some!! con­tains a sin­gle scene of base­ball being played, and it is per­haps one of the most majes­tic and lyri­cal ever cap­tured. Lin­klater doesn’t strain for effect, or attempt to make the game look arti­fi­cial through cam­era trick­ery or over­ly-arty fram­ing. The sequence is at once func­tion­al and musi­cal, one to be stud­ied and pored over. It’s pure ballet.

Cou­ple the cos­mic imagery with the clear-cut par­ti­tion between blue skies and green fields, and it even recalls the Blue Danube waltz sequence in Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lin­klater explored ques­tions of human evo­lu­tion in his pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Boy­hood, and does so again here, albeit in a more abstract man­ner. And though evok­ing Kubrick might dent the film’s empa­thy cre­den­tials, it should be said that this is a shim­mer­ing mod­el of humane filmmaking.

This is also a film that con­founds expec­ta­tion, bril­liant­ly chal­leng­ing the cliché that schol­ar­ly life is gov­erned by a rigid cul­tur­al caste sys­tem. Indeed, it prac­tices what it preach­es, show­ing how easy it is for punks to mix with jocks, jocks with thes­ps, fresh­men with seniors, and every­one with a self-impor­tant, gog­gle-eyed din­gus named Jay Niles (Jus­ton Street). Life, it seems, is one big cir­cle-pit of nos­tal­gic bon­homie. Polit­i­cal antag­o­nism is just a state of mind. This film is a flower in the gun bar­rel of con­ser­v­a­tive big­otry and arro­gance. It’s about the sim­ple joy of mak­ing connections.

Alter the set­tings on our long-range tele­scopes and we can also see that Linklater’s career has begun to form its own daz­zling and com­plex con­stel­la­tion. Although Dazed and Con­fused is its clos­est kin, ele­ments of Every­body Wants Some!! exist in many of his oth­er films: the coun­ter­cul­tur­al city sym­pho­ny of Slack­er; the roman­tic hypoth­e­sis­ing of the Before tril­o­gy; the sin­cere wor­ship of FM radio stom­pers in School of Rock; the pop meta­physics of Wak­ing Life; there’s even a link to the chest-bump­ing cama­raderie of The New­ton Boys and Bad News Bears.

It’s breath­tak­ing what Lin­klater is doing, this shape he is build­ing. What’s more grat­i­fy­ing is that, once this struc­ture is fin­ished, peo­ple might look at it and see dif­fer­ent things. All we can say at this point is… bat­ter up!