Everybody Wants Some!! film review: Witty and affecting

After his intimate, generation-spanning epic Boyhood, Richard Linklater is back with an equally special and magical film, albeit one with a much tighter focus. Everybody Wants Some!! is set in 1980 over a few days at a college in Texas where Jake (Blake Jenner) has just arrived on a baseball scholarship. He is staying in a house with his new teammates, who are randy, juvenile and addicted to winning. They have time to kill before training (and school classes) begin in earnest.

The wonder of the film is the utterly sure-footed way in which Linklater combines raucous National Lampoon-style frat boy humour with lyricism and nostalgia. This is a movie in the spirit of Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni or Barry Levinson’s Diner – a witty and affecting drama about young bucks out to have as much fun as possible and who are so busy trying to enjoy themselves that they don’t even realise that they are at a pivotal moment in their lives, on the cusp of adulthood.

Linklater recreates the world of the early Eighties in loving detail. He pays exhaustive attention to everything from the haircuts to the cars, from the t-shirts to the sideburns, from the discos to the old computer games. Inevitably, music plays an absolutely crucial part in evoking the era. The eclectic soundtrack includes Stiff Little Fingers, Hot Chocolate, Van Halen (whose hard rock anthem gives the film its title), Blondie and plenty of disco. At the same time, he is acutely observant of the mindset of the young would-be professional baseball players. They are all intensely competitive. Their will to win manifests itself in every aspect of their lives, from who uses the bathroom first to smoking the most dope and drinking the most beer; from casual games of table tennis to the ongoing battle to pick up girls. Their swagger masks a basic insecurity. They're far more timid and inexperienced with women than they let on. They are also blithely deluded about their own abilities as potential baseball professionals. They may have been star players at high school but, in truth, only one or two have any chance of making the grade in the major leagues.

Generally, in literature and in film as in real life itself, there is a great divide between the jocks and the bohemian, intellectual types. Linklater, though, is a director who straddles both worlds. As in almost all his films, and especially the Before Sunrise series, he elicits seemingly spontaneous performances from his young leads. He deals in typically sensitive fashion with the courtship between Jake and young theatre major Beverly (Zoey Deutch), who takes a shine to him precisely because he seems the quiet type rather than a boorish, horny athlete like his friends. At the same time, this is a rites of passage ensemble comedy in which many of the best moments are the crudest, most lowbrow ones.