Bottoms—which puts a queer spin on teen sex comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, American Pie, Superbad, and (the partially queer) Booksmart—is at its best when it is at its most anarchic. (Was that a pronounced penis I saw on the school’s furry mascot during the climactic football game?) This time, the sexually starved main characters are PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), best friends who are societal outcasts not so much because they’re gay, but because they’re “ugly and untalented.” And so they hatch a plan to start an empowering self-defense class for women, hoping it will bring some women their way. Much like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Bottoms—which reteams Sennott with her Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman—doesn’t aim to make some grand feminist pronouncement, but instead comically describe what it’s like to be a certain kind of woman in a male-dominated world. Here, that looks like a couple of queer kids in a high school that has completely given itself over to the football team and its quarterback, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine). Sexually suggestive posters of Jeff plaster the walls, while pep rallies turn into violent expressions of idol worship. Meanwhile, the football players stalk the halls (in their cleats, a great gag) like prowling animals. (One of them is so strong and manly that he’s kept in a cage in the corner of class.) It’s all very funny, carried over by the camaraderie between the two stars. Sennott has a way of blurting out one-liners that comedically escalate a situation, while Edebiri (of Hulu’s The Bear) has a mumbling, deflecting demeanor that slips jokes in when you least expect them. They make a great comic team, to the point that you may not even mind that the last third is a bit of a struggle between feel-good formula and curious plot mechanics.
(8/22/2023)
