Everybody Wants Some!!

For all the praise lavished upon it, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was overburdened by its need to treat its slight coming-of-age tale as a profound state-of-the-union address. By comparison, Everybody Wants Some!! is the director at his loosest and funniest; he’s working in the plotless, discursive mode that has defined much of his strongest work. The film follows the members of a Texas university baseball team in 1980 through the three days before classes begin—essentially the international waters of adulthood, where all laws seem momentarily suspended, after you have left your parents’ watchful eyes but before the realities of post-secondary education have set in. In these giddy first few days of university life, everyone seems as drunk on possibility as they are on, uh, more mundane substances. But Linklater is not simply taking easy shots at horndog jock culture here. He’s diving deep into the hormone-addled tribal dynamics of campus life, and viewers might very well feel at times like amateur anthropologists along for the ride. The first 15 minutes alone could aptly be titled, “Put ‘er there, champ: A study of the ritualistic purposes of handshaking in post-adolescent American athletic subcultures.”

Linklater treats the hyper-competitive, testosterone-fuelled adventures of the group with a fond, if occasionally mocking touch, although nostalgia does admittedly soften the film’s edges at times. Still, nostalgia is a barbed emotion, and its presence is also a sign of things lost. Small conflicts flare up between the teammates only to be muffled by the endless roundelay of parties, but there is a strong sense of future tensions that will push these people in different directions. (You can almost imagine one of those closing 1980s college comedy where-are-they-now montages running over the credits, outlining each person’s diverging life path in a few pithy lines.) Everyone is in the early days of discovering themselves, and it becomes clear as the film progresses not everyone will like what they find. Some seem destined to drop out or fail, others to remain forever outside of the group, and others to abandon the sport that has defined their lives up until that point. If time feels suspended for these three days, that just makes the looming threat of its resumption all the more potent. Fittingly, the film ends with a pair of our raunchy Rip Van Winkles dozing through history class. One suspects their eyes will remain shut until the final exam—and that they’ll wake up screaming.