In Everybody Wants Some!!, a profoundly affable comedy loaded with big laughs and zen musings filtered through an inclusive jock philosophy, director Richard Linklater picks up where he left off with Dazed and Confused.
The new film is appropriately billed as a “spiritual sequel” to Linklater’s shaggy cult hit about the last day of class at a Texas high school in the 1970s, and (as the director has said in at least one interview) it also works as a successor to the coming-of-age story of Boyhood, which left its protagonist at the start of his freshman year of college.
It’s Texas in 1980: “My Sharona” is on the radio, the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. is at least a year or two away, 18-year-olds can swill beer at the local bar, and the members of a college baseball team require only a hasty wardrobe change to fit in at a disco club, a kitschy honky tonk, or a punk rock dive. The weekend before the fall semester begins at the fictional Southeast Texas University, freshman pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner) joins his new teammates at their shared off-campus house for three-plus days of ritualistic male bonding — Although it’s unlikely anyone but the smooth-talking Finnegan (Glen Powell), the team’s rationalist leader, would characterize their skirt-chasing, boozing, competitive ping-ponging capers in those words.
Through Jake’s eyes, we’re introduced to a crew united in their zest for baseball and a good time, including McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), the hot-headed star hitter, and Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), whose fondness for marijuana and astrophysicist Carl Sagan establishes him as the group’s resident mystic stoner. Later on, there’s the “auburn-haired girl in 307,” Beverly (Zoey Deutch), who invites Jake to conclude his horizon-expanding weekend at a party with the theater kids, but Everybody Wants Some!! never strays far from its focus on the dynamics of the boys’ club.
What little plot there is sends the guys from party to party, bar to bar, with pit stops in the locker room and the de facto frat house. Along the way, there are plenty of jokes and insights on, among other things, the liminal nature of college, like when one of the baseball players marvels — not unkindly — that they are surrounded by students who have no shot at a career in Major League Baseball, who will someday be “some dude doing some job just like everybody else.”
Linklater, who played college baseball in Texas himself, has a clear affection for these characters and for the setting, which is lovingly re-created in look and sound. (To reel off a few songs from a stellar soundtrack: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Devo’s “Whip It,” and “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang.) In the wrong hands, this could all be either crude, schmaltzy, or dull, but a likable cast and Linklater’s deft direction strike a fine balance between funny and sentimental.
The film alludes to the question of what happens after college. Can these young men, now in the apparent primes of their lives, truly find meaning in being “some dude doing some job just like everyone else?” But Everybody Wants Some!! is more concerned with enjoying the glory days while they last.
