Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Rather than some reprisal of Dazed and Confused, as often reported, this felt to me more like director and writer Richard Linklater in a Damsels in Distress mood. Although I see the point. Baseball is involved in both, and all the characters in Everybody Wants Some!! are dazed and confused. But then, everybody in Dazed and Confused also wants some. The new one, at any rate, takes place over a few days in the late summer of 1980 as students gather on a small campus for the fall term. It's focused specifically on a group of baseball players—jocks, not to put too fine a point on it. By day they furiously compete at games of all kinds. At night, they careen from one subculture of the time to the next, from a disco, to a honkytonk inspired by Urban Cowboy (did I mention this is set in Texas?), to a punk-rock show. These scenes are animated by the soundtrack and are very exciting. They're the best part, but it's also pretty funny. As comedies go, you're likely to laugh, as long as you're OK with a bunch of adolescent horseplay. Linklater chases the mindset down with a look at the bunch of them constantly competing: playing ping pong, video games, gambling on stunts, and more. There's even a game that involves abusing one another's knuckles. It's all high-spirited with a sweet late-summer romance theme playing out as well. It switches up on expectations by going off in such unexpected directions. What does a bunch of post-adolescent baseball players at a small college in Texas have to do with anything? That's the beauty part of it, or one of them. It's more focused on getting certain period details right, exactly right, such as the state of men's facial hair, which ranged a bit but focused mostly on mustaches. The music is perfect, all of it, and things like the punk-rock show are unexpectedly vivid (and right). I don't know much about any of the players—they're young and fresh-faced and often very good, at least as an ensemble. Justin Street takes it right over the top as a Napoleon Dynamite style social maladapt who thinks a flaming fastball is going to be his ticket to everything he's ever dreamed of. He is otherwise randomly spastic and out of control. The group stoner turns out to have a totally unexpected secret, though it somehow seems familiar to Linklater, or perhaps that is Texas. Everybody Wants Some!! is mostly awkward male bonding, falling all over one another like colts. It's a poignant historical moment, just months before Ronald Reagan's first election, about which it wisely has nothing to say. I think this movie is counting on you to bring your own baggage, although it's possible this is aimed at a youth market? I don't know. Somehow I doubt that. It feels more like late baby boomer nostalgia, but it's done effectively and is fully entertaining surprisingly often.