By Jake Coyle
The rites and rituals of the raunchy high-school comedy can be as prescribed as a class syllabus. But what makes Emma Seligman's "Bottoms" such an anarchic thrill is how much it couldn't care less.
Sure, come to "Bottoms" with your expectations of house parties and hijinks. But you'll be leaving with a field full of bloodied football players.
Seligman's film, which opens in theaters Friday, instead follows its own demented logic in a winding and surreal comedy of adolescent absurdity. The brash PJ ( Rachel Sennott ) and the more hesitant Josie ( Ayo Edebiri ) are longtime best friends who, in reaching senior year at Rock Ridge High, have either finally attained a much sought-after status ("We're finally hot," insists PJ) or bottomed out at the low end of the high-school totem pole.
"Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal's office?" the principal (Wayne Pére) announces over the PA.
PJ and Josie, accepting that description, meekly make their way down the hall. But PJ plans to put up a fight. While Josie is more resigned to her lonely fate ("I'm not trying to sow my oats," she says), PJ is resolved to stir it up in her final year. They have no high-minded goals or even an especially coherent plan. "Bottoms" likewise aspires to be no paragon of lesbian representation or female empowerment. It would rather be sillier, more gleefully un-PC and way bloodier than your average high-school comedy.
PJ and Josie would most of all like to make more headway with their cheerleader crushes. Josie likes Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and PJ swoons for Brittany ( Kaia Gerber ). Neither shows even the slightest interest in PJ or Josie; Isabel is dating the football quarterback Jeff ( Nicholas Galitzine ). In the history of high school comedies, football jocks have never been seen quite like this; they're outlandish, ridiculous people. They're also babies. When the girls' car ever so slightly taps Jeff on the knee, it's taken as a near-death experience, bringing down the principal's wrath and prompting rumors (stoked by PJ) that the girls are a violent duo who killed someone in "juvie."
This might have been a little running gag for most movies, but Seligman and Sennott's script takes it as a linchpin for the rest of movie. Playing off their bad reputation, PJ launches a self-defense group — a "fight club" — for girls, hoping that Brittany shows up, too. Of course, it would be implausible if such a student group didn't have a school-sanctioned advisor. Enter their divorcing social studies teacher Mr. G ( Marshawn Lynch ), who's in the midst of derisively giving a lesson on feminism. Yes, one of the few adults in "Bottoms" is the former NFL all-star running back known as "Beast Mode" — and he's hysterical.
This is the second movie by Seligman, whose 2020 "Shiva Baby" (also starring Sennott) was a clever and highly anxious debut about a bisexual Jewish woman attending a shiva with her family. Her follow-up is more antic and off-the-cuff but similarly allergic to falling back on the expected. "Bottoms" can feel slapdash and unmodulated. But it's always its own unhinged thing. There's one student here (Ruby Cruz, charming) planting pipe bombs. There isn't a line reading by Edebiri, currently everywhere, that doesn't have its own unique rhythm. And Sennott, a frizzy-haired ball of mayhem, is a comedy star in the making.
Not all the jokes land but they do fly. "Bottoms," a queer comedy with a chaotic beat, is here to break stuff — and that's a very good thing.
"Bottoms," an MGM release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some violence. Running time: 92 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Jake Coyle is an AP film writer
New York Film Fest Preview: “The Brutalist,” “Nickel Boys,” “April,” “All We Imagine as Light”
When you think of blockbusters, the first thing that comes to mind might not be a 215-minute postwar epic screening for the first time at Lincoln Center. But that was the scene last week when the New York Film Festival hosted a 70mm print of Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist." The festival hadn't then officially begun — its 62nd edition opens Friday — but the advance press screening drew long lines — as some attendees noted, not unlike those at Ellis Island in the film — and a packed Walter Reade Theatre. Word had gotten around: "The Brutalist" is something to see. Corbet's epic, starring Adrian Brody as a Jewish architect remaking his life in Pennsylvania, is the kind of colossal cinematic construction that doesn't come around every day. Shot in VistaVision and structured like movements in a symphony (with a 15-minute intermission to boot), "The Brutalist" is indeed something to behold. It's arthouse and blockbuster in one, and, maybe, a reminder of the movies' capacity for uncompromising grandeur — and the awe that can inspire. It's been fashionable in recent years to wonder about the fate of the movies, but it can be hard to placate those concerns at the New York Film Festival. The festival prizes itself on gathering the best cinema from around the world. And this year, the movies are filled with bold forays of form and perspective that you can feel pushing film forward. This is also the time Oscar campaigns begin lurching into gear, with Q&As and cocktail parties. But, unlike last year when "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie" were entrenched as favorites, the best picture race is said to be wide open. In that vacuum, movies like "The Brutalist" and the NYFF opener, RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys," not to mention Sean Baker's "Anora" and Jacques Audiard's... Read More