Everybody Wants Some!! is Richard Linklater’s most deceptive film. On its surface it is light as a feather but hang out with it for its 100-minute (and far too short!) length and its 11 unique characters leave an indelible impression. Linklater, the director of numerous classics (Before Midnight, Boyhood) is also adroit at the offbeat (Bernie) and the pure entertainment, such as Dazed and Confused, his excellent look at high school in the 1970s.
Dubbed by former college baseball player Linklater as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! (named after a Van Halen song) takes place at a Texas university in 1980. Its subjects, the college’s acclaimed baseball team, inhabit two houses on campus. The team’s two ringleaders couldn’t be more different from each other yet they share a swaggering confidence. Finnegan or “Finn” (a superb Glen Powell) is a rabble-rousing firebrand. McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) suffers the role of the severe competitor, coiled as tight as a cobra.
Maneuvering through the tangle of camaraderie, is the film’s narrator, Jake (Blake Jenner), a wide-eyed and fearless freshman. When he walks into the team house for the first time, Jake encounters McReynolds, (a mustached Keith Hernandez lookalike), who promptly declares “I hate pitchers” when he finds out Jake’s position. Thus begins a whirlwind of witty posturing, raucous bickering, and even some honest-to-God hazing. This stuff only works when the dialogue is crisp and the editing sharp. Linklater, as savvy a filmmaker as there is, provides both in spades, and uses a well-chosen, varied soundtrack (everything from Rapper’s Delight to Stiff Little Fingers) so integrally edited, it seems like another major character.
When the film’s lead female character Beverly (Zoey Deutsch), (a theater major!) enters the scene, she barely alters the guys’ chemistry, except, of course, Jake’s. He’s clearly smitten yet appears to be taking a lesson from the film Swingers in waiting a while to make his move.
It’s at least somewhere around the halfway point when this hilarious coming of age comedy that rivals Barry Levinson’s Diner actually ventures onto the ball field. Here, in a brief serious turn, the film assumes an assured feel for the leadership and mental preparation crucial in the makeup of a successful baseball team. All the crazy head games surrounding the constant pursuit of sex and laughs and drinking suddenly coalesce into meaningfulness. When McReynolds goes in the batter’s biz against the off-the-wall major league pitching prospect Jay Niles (Justin Street) and subsequently lectures the 95-mph-fastball-tossing egoist on what it means to be on a team, he speaks with a deep-rooted authority directly pulled from his sense of community. This excellent scene is about as far away from the cliches of a sports movie as it gets.
Everybody Wants Some!! earns its authenticity through Linklater’s ability to produce wonderful characters doing ostensibly ordinary things. Make no mistake, this film is shot through an idyllic prism. Realism tempered by 35 years of distance can certainly skew things entirely in the opposite direction. Although this film possesses such a romanticized slant it borders on tongue in cheek, Linklater, bracing his scenes with such a wealth of
believable detail, makes it impossible to want it any other way.