There are a lot of laughs, a great deal of delirious silliness and what I must insist is a cinephile reference to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil in this very funny high-school comedy from director Emma Seligman, and starring her co-writer Rachel Sennott, who last worked with Seligman on her debut feature Shiva Baby. Bottoms is about two gay teen girls and bickering best friends who want to get some sexual experience and it all plays like a moderately scuffed-up and entirely non-heterosexual version of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart – though no one in this film shows the smallest interest in books, certainly not the teachers.
PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) hang out, obsessing in a self-harming and masochistic way about the two gorgeous and evidently straight cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber) with whom they are tragically in love. But when Josie accidentally touches the knee of the star quarterback with her car, and he reacts like a whingeing diva, PJ and Josie get a completely undeserved reputation for being aggressive badasses. They start a self-defence “fight club” whose first rule is to talk self-admiringly about their club all the time – because they figure it will be seen as a radically feminist empowering association which Isabel and Brittany will want to join. But before that happens, their club is dominated by their fellow losers, including explosives enthusiast Hazel (Ruby Cruz), one of whose detonations coincides with an important kiss.
Bottoms is actually a bizarrely violent film, and its plot is always teetering on the brink of pure incoherence, but it’s always funny, thanks to the goofy and winning comic presences of Sennott and Edebiri; football star turned actor Marshawn Lynch is amusing as their indulgent, sexist teacher Mr G; while the “bomb attack” sequence to the accompaniment of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart is glorious. As for Seligman and Sennott, in the words (almost) of Cole Porter, they’re the tops.
• Bottoms is released on 3 November in UK and Irish cinemas, and on 30 November in Australia.
