Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott’s high-school comedy is loud, filthy and properly funny, with Ayo Edebiri and Sennott a real double act. It is also slacker in its plotting than it needs to be, and the jokes do more of the work than the story.
Emma Seligman’s first film, Shiva Baby, shut Rachel Sennott in a house full of relatives and made comedy out of pure discomfort. Bottoms, which the two of them wrote together, goes the other way. It is broad, bright and bloody, a high-school sex comedy in which two unpopular gay girls start a fight club to get near the cheerleaders, and it wants you to laugh out loud rather than squirm. Most of the time we did. The film is funny for most of its 91 minutes, Sennott and Ayo Edebiri are a real double act, and the plot is the weakest thing in it by some distance.
PJ (Sennott) is the loud one, Josie (Edebiri) the anxious one. A collision with Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the quarterback, and a rumour that they spent the summer in juvenile detention give them a reputation they decide to keep. The self-defence club follows, with Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch), a teacher in the middle of a divorce he discusses with his class, as its sponsor. Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber) turn up. So does Hazel (Ruby Cruz), whom nobody wanted and who is the only one to take it seriously. The girls hit each other, and they enjoy it more than anyone expected.
Nate Jones builds a school in which the football team wears full kit, pads and all, to every lesson, and Eunice Jera Lee keeps them in it, so that a boy in shoulder pads sits eating a sandwich at the back of an ordinary scene and nobody remarks on it. The corridors are lined with posters that repay reading; the film hides jokes in them and never points. Maria Rusche shoots it flat and bright, like a teen film from twenty-five years ago, which is the point: this is what those films looked like, with the people the genre pushed to the edge of frame now standing in the middle. Hanna Park cuts fast and puts the training sessions together as montage, punches, bloody noses and girls grinning through them. Leo Birenberg’s score does the swelling strings at the sincere moments with a straight face, and Charli xcx supplies the pulse under the parties.
Sennott plays PJ with the confidence of someone twice as attractive and half as clever, marching into every room with a plan. Edebiri is the reason the film works. Josie wants Isabel and cannot get a sentence about it out without apologising, and Edebiri lets the words fall sideways, half-swallowed, corrected before they have finished. There is a dinner at Isabel’s house where Josie tries to hold a lie together, and we laughed until we had to look away from the screen. It is the funniest sustained stretch in the film, and it is funny because Edebiri never once asks to be liked. Lynch, as Mr. G, is deadpan and enormous and reads from his own divorce paperwork in class, and every line he has lands. Cruz plays Hazel’s keenness without a flicker of irony and is quietly the film’s best person.
The script does not know what to do once the club exists. Seligman and Sennott have a premise, a set of running jokes and a finale, and the middle of the film moves between them by having people simply decide things. A rift between the two leads arrives because the structure needs one, and the film plays it with a sincerity the surrounding jokes have not prepared us for. We felt the gears change and, for a few minutes, started checking the time, which at 91 minutes ought not to be possible. The last act goes somewhere bloodier than we will describe. We had enjoyed ourselves enough to go along with it and still thought it was a leap.
Most critics have liked it about as much as we have. A minority found it a mess, and they are right about the plot and wrong about how much it matters here. Set beside Heathers and But I’m a Cheerleader, which it plainly admires, it has less to say about the place it is mocking, but it gets more laughs per minute than either.
See it with people who will laugh at a boy in shoulder pads eating cereal. Alone, on a sofa, the gaps between the jokes are longer than they seemed in a full cinema.
