Everybody Wants Some!!

Blake Jenner and Zoey Deutch in Everybody Wants Some!!

Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! struck me as one of the lesser efforts by one of our better filmmakers. At least part of the problem of this self-described sequel to Dazed and Confused is that Linklater was not as fortunate in his casting as he was in 1993. Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, and Ryan Guzman don't give the film the juice that McConaughey, Posey, Affleck, Jovovich, Zellweger, et al, ad gloriam, ad nauseam did twenty years ago. Linklater had a similar problem with Jason London in Dazed and Confused: charisma on film remains hard to predict.

Like its predecessor, Everybody Wants Some!! haphazardly chronicles the social life and mating habits of young Texans. The Linklater stand-in has left behind his small Texas town of the late 70s and started the 80s as a baseball player at college. He is greeted by his teammates, initiated into the group, and joins them for their rites: playing Nerf basketball in their dorm, hitting the club scene, and cruising the streets for action. The distaff side is slighted here, though. In Dazed and Confused, Linklater spent as much time on Parker Posey harassing the freshman gals as did on Ben Affleck and his cohorts trying to paddle Wiley Wiggins. There is not much of an attempt here at female characterization and the film suffers for it. Zoey Deutch is charming, though, as the deus ex girlfriend.

In both films, Linklater portrays youth as a time for trying on different identities: stoner or jock, stud or S.N.A.G. This leads to the most successful sequences in Everybody Wants Some!!, the nightclub scenes which exude aimless fun. Our heroes visit a disco, a honky-tonk bar, and a punk club in a search for identity and female companionship. Though the search for identity is more fluid for the young, I don't think it is quite as open-ended as Linklater portrays it here. Some, like the Hemingway fixated Adam Goldberg character in Dazed and Confused, hold onto their chosen identity so tightly it causes them pain; but pain is not in the script for Everybody Wants Some!!. 

However, when the Linklater stand-in meets his lady love (a theater major), we can envision him putting aside his childish things (like his baseball glove) for an 8mm camera. That lies in the future for the protagonist. For now, he has to go to class where, like Wiley Wiggins at the end of Dazed and Confused, he is able to get some well-earned sleep. The sense of deja-vu is comforting and nostalgic, but not particularly illuminating. (8/24/16)