I’m not sure real-world teens are into making pacts, but High School Movie Teens are always making pacts about losing their virginity and having one last crazy night and stuff like that — a trope that is twisted and bent in utterly ridiculous and smart and cleverly satirical fashion in director/co-writer Emma Seligman’s subversively fantastic “Bottoms.” I’ve got your back-to-school viewing assignment right here in this queer, dark-comedy send-up of films such as “Superbad” and “American Pie.”
In keeping with teen comedy tradition, we start off with the obligatory BFF duo, wonderfully played by the “Ayo and Rachel Are Single” duo of Ayo Edebiri (who we also love on “The Bear”) and Rachel Sennott, who co-wrote this screenplay and starred in Seligman’s “Shiva Baby” and was also terrific in “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” so kudos to the casting. Sennott’s PJ and Edebiri’s Josie are classic teen movie outcasts — not because they’re gay, but because they’re socially awkward and “ugly, untalented gays,” as they put it.
Determined to lose their virginity before graduation (“Do you want to be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?” says PJ to Josie) and inspired by a rumor they spent the summer in “juvie” which makes them appear to be badasses when they are not, PJ and Josie come up with the whack idea of creating a self-defense group with distinct echoes of a fight club. Sure, why not.
The club is really just a ruse for Josie and PJ to make their moves on the hot cheerleaders in school, including the impossibly tall and gorgeous and seemingly icy Brittany (Kaia Gerber), who has a bedroom the size of a pricey condo, and the sweet but apparently clueless Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), who is dating the philandering football star Jeff (a very funny Nicholas Galitzine), a cartoonishly dopey jerk who listens to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on his headphones because he thinks he’s sensitive but he’s not, he’s really and truly not. (In one of the movie’s many over-the-top yet hilarious running gags, Jeff and his fellow morons on the football team wear their uniforms all the time. It also appears as if there are about 14 guys on the team, tops.)
Of course, if you’re going to have a sanctioned club that meets on school property, you need a faculty advisor — so ladies and gentlemen, here’s the former NFL running back Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch absolutely killing it as the social studies teacher Mr. G., who is one of the worst instructors in the history of high school movies.
“Bottoms” pokes fun at high school movie stereotypes while at the same time embracing the cliché, as when PJ gets power-drunk and turns into the very type of bully she abhors. PJ and Josie lose sight of who they really are and what their friendship is all about as they get caught up in their newfound popularity, and the girls in the club get their revenge against the misogynistic Jeff with a prank that starts off innocently enough before blowing up, big time. It’s all very familiar and yet rendered in a manner that’s quite weird and surreal.
At times playing like a cross between “But I’m a Cheerleader” and “Heathers,” with a number of other satires such as “Cruel Intentions” coming to mind as well, “Bottoms” has a cheerfully warped sense of humor with a sharp bite of social commentary, as when the girls who have joined the club talk in casual terms about all the men they’ve had to fend off, from stepfathers to stalkers. No topic is off limits, from rape to bulimia to suicide to murder.
Not every joke lands, but with a brisk running time of 1 hour and 32 minutes, director/co-writer Seligman displays a keen sense of timing and a real awareness of how to make a point with edgy wit and then move on to the next target as we’re still admiring her willingness to go there, and there, and also there.
