Film Review - Booksmart (15)

We are not one-dimensional. We are smart and fun.

Booksmart comes a mere twelve years after Superbad, the film with which it will be most regularly compared, and yet these two movies seem a whole generation apart. There's much, admittedly, that links actor Olivia Wilde's directorial debut with classic US high-school comedies (add Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused to the list). The more things change, after all, the more they stay the same. But with nerdily progressive best-friends Any and Molly taking centre-stage, Booksmart is very 2019 indeed.

 

The pair have been thick as thieves for years, sharp wit and academic endeavour their preferred means of bonding. These school careers have been all Library and no socialising beyond the witty/dirty sparring they do with each other. One day prior to Graduation, as their Los Angeles alma mater devolves into 'school's out forever' chaos, Molly makes a devastating discovery. Her and Amy's fellow-students, apparent slackers included, have achieved college places just as good as theirs while having actual fun along the way. The girls' mission becomes clear. Find the most essential pre-Graduation party going, and cram four years of missed opportunities into one crazy night.

Booksmart has the outrageous and raunchy sensibility you might expect from its well-worn genre, and yet from its opening moments there's a vibrancy and freshness to it also. The all-female writing team are close enough to modern teenage life to get its rhythms and concerns, yet sufficiently removed to observe it with wry affection. As with the best school-based comedies, this is as much for those looking back, as for the ones still experiencing. With its 'smart and fun' central duo it's proudly feminist, yet the main agenda here is to be funny (solid if not 100% hit rate) and deep-down real (where the film scores Superhigh).

The realest aspect of the movie is without doubt Amy and Molly - a relationship that feels lived-in the way few big-screen partnerships achieve. There's a natural quality to their rapport, suggesting two friends utterly in their comfort-zone together. Kaitlyn Dever as Amy, the quieter, defensively ironic one, has proved her dramatic credentials in Detroit and Beautiful Boy. Beanie Feldstein as driving-force Molly, was a memorably funny sidekick to Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird. Together they're a comic tour de force that can deliver full-blooded emotional punch in key scenes. The chemistry between them - witty, hilarious and at least once heartbreaking - should rocket both to stardom. 

There's a joy in their fellow-students too, each sufficiently fleshed out to transcend caricature, with several proving significantly different from first appearances. This movie refuses to label and judge, even if its teen characters sometimes do so instinctively. The result is that the socially inept rich kid, the dumb jock, the party-in-the-back-seat girl, all get to reveal actual layers, and to be funny and touching in the process. As for the drama society queens, they're fearlessly outlandish to a point that transcends all ridicule.

 

Respect goes to director Wilde for injecting the film with as much youthful energy and libido as any of its testosterone-fuelled predecessors. As a director she's got a great eye for the comic, enhancing all the youthful performances (aside from a few moments when the propulsive soundtrack becomes intrusive instead). There's a building sense of the protagonists' mentally altering states as the evening progresses, along with flashes of the surreal, but Wilde also knows when to quieten things down and let pathos sink in. If Booksmart heralds a whole new career path for the longtime jobbing actress, that's a prospect to relish.

There's much about Booksmart that's familiar, but it'll be remembered - and it'll surely achieve beloved status in the high school comedy canon - for everything it does that's new. It's relatively easy to create a sense of teen anarchy and to gross out your audience, much less so to capture a whole new zeitgeist or to create empathy for the characters along the way. Wilde and co do both of the latter in spades. This rites of passage adventure goes some unexpected places, truly earning its place in the Movies of '19 Yearbook.

Gut Reaction: Not quite so much gut-laughter as during Superbad, but something more subtle. A persistent smile, while rooting for these proactively geeky characters.

Memorable Moment: One of our duo runs an emotional underwater gauntlet.

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. Sometimes raw, frequently funny and always clever, Booksmart loves its characters, Amy and Molly most of all. It'll make you love them too.

Film Review - The Hate U Give (12A)

How many more of us do you have to kill before you get it?

The Hate U Give is adapted from Angie Thomas's award-winning debut novel of 2017. The book became a young adult literary sensation through its head-on tackling of some very adult, very contemporary themes. And any sense that the film is going to pander to a young audience is banished pretty much instantly it begins. Transcending all that 'teen movie' might imply, it proves darker, harder and more challenging in cultural terms than anything its 12A rating might lead you to expect.

Amandla Stanberg plays Starr Carter, brought up in Garden Heights, an economically struggling, predominantly black neighbourhood plagued by gang violence. Her parents have fought hard for her place in the private, largely white Williamson Prep School, although her attendance there results in a kind of double life. She mustn't appear too 'hood' (her word) at Williamson, or bring too much of the prep-school girl back to Garden Heights. But the balance between Starr's two worlds is threatened along with much else, when she is the sole witness to a devastating moment of police violence. The consequences of the incident will test everything her parents have taught her, forging the kind of adult she will become.

Reflecting US news stories that occur with painful regularity, The Hate U Give is as powerful and articulate a cry of rage in its way as Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman. It has the intelligence to deal with its racially charged subject-matter in a nuanced way, yet ultimately asserts its beliefs with bold conviction. At its heart is a truly revelatory performance from the 20-year-old Stanberg. (Remember tragic little Rue in the first Hunger Games film?) She's charming as the lively, intelligent teenager, and then so much more when her world is shattered in a terrible instant. Grief, fury, compassion and defiance - she conveys them all with breathtaking power and sincerity. Her CV shows her to be no novice, but for me this is like the arrival of a very special talent.

She has back-up at all points, starting with a smart adapted screenplay that allows moments of humour to leaven the fierceness of the drama. George Tillman Jr's direction is focused, maximising the story's power without ever letting it slip into melodrama. In fact realness is this movie's watchword. Russell Hornsby and Girls Trip's Regina Hall apply different but complimentary kinds of wisdom as Starr's parents, his gang tattoos clueing us to a turbulent past that still haunts him. One-time rapper Common brings alternative perspective as her police officer Uncle Carlos, while Anthony Mackie (such an all-round decent guy as Falcon in the Captain America movies) has real menace as a local gang boss. Look out too for Detroit's Algee Smith, effortlessly charismatic as Starr's childhood friend Khalil. 

They - and others - represent key facets of Starr's life and the conflicting directions in which she's being pulled, as she struggles to find her own course of action in the eye of a tumultuous storm.

Demanding that the Black Lives Matter movement be not just listened to but properly heard, with a title from Tupac Shakur's Thug Life acronym ('The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone'), this film is as fearless as the novel on which it is based. Racism, crime, poverty, police brutality, privilege, community, identity, inter-racial relationships - they're all dealt with here without flinching. There's also a debate on the significance of macaroni cheese and an extended Harry Potter metaphor. Now that's a movie - teen or otherwise - for our times. Make it a priority.

Gut Reaction: Lots of hand-clasped-to-face action, several visibly startled moment and I spoke out involuntarily at one point (a rare occurrence). Never less than utterly gripped and pretty emotional into the bargain.

Where Are the Women?: Properly introducing Amandla Stanberg, with great supporting turns from Regina Hall and Issa Rae (as political activist April Ofrah). And that sharp screenplay comes courtesy of Audrey Wells.

Ed's Verdict: 8.5/10. The more I think about it, the more I'm impressed. Searing drama that dares to wrestle with some seriously pressing questions.