Everybody Wants Some!!

By Frankie Larry

The first thing you hear: “My Sharona” by The Knack. The first thing you see: a cassette car radio, volume all the way up. It’s Linklater. It’s 1980. You know exactly where you are and what you’re in for.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), known as the spiritual successor to Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), follows the exploits of a college baseball team the last weekend before classes start for the semester. We count the days through the eyes of Jake Langford, a freshman on the team played by Blake Jenner.

The film is a prolonged hangout, navigating party after party, bong hit after bong hit, coming to a conclusion right when classes begin. It’s fun and humorous; with Glen Powell’s Finnegan acting as the comedic center and almost every other team member having their own laughable moment. The dialogue is one of the film’s strongest points. It totally captures the subtle awkwardness that comes with getting to know people within those first few days of college, yet also hits that quick friendliness that comes with being on a team or having a roommate. The scene where Jake first moves in depicts this perfectly. It’s realistic, but dialed up enough to trigger some laughter.

Other highlights include the film’s costuming, which firmly plants you in the time and place of early 80s Texas, capturing the different subcultural fashions of the time. The soundtrack is filled with hits from the late 70s, but the film never overrelies on music to set its tone.

The film delivers on its promise of a good time, however, just as in Dazed and Confused, there’s more to it than just partying. There are two characters who offer opposing ideologies concerning how to best live life, which Jake, and by extension the audience, are asked to choose between. To assimilate into whatever the dominant environment is, or be yourself, always, and lead with that. It’s a question pertinent to those in a new phase of life, such as entering university, but it’s also a universal question that’s perpetually relevant.

Jake, while not resistant to dressing like a clubber, cowboy, or punk to fit into whatever party he’s at, in hopes of scoring with a girl, questions conformity and, by the second half of the film, seems to choose himself. The film makes no big claim or moral judgement, but simply tosses the question into the air and nudges one to contemplate.

Overall, it’s a film about transitions. As the penultimate frame of the film says, frontiers are where you find them; they can be anywhere and come up at any point in your life, but it’s for you to decide how to journey through them.