Booksmart Movie Review

Booksmart (2019)

Rent Booksmart on Amazon Video
Written by: Emily Halpern & Sarah Haskins and Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman (written by)
Directed by: Olivia Wilde
Starring: Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Jason Sudeikis, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
On the eve of their high school graduation, two academic superstars & best friends realize they should have worked less and played more. Determined not to fall short of their peers, the girls try to cram four years of fun into one night.

Verdict
This is a well written movie that rises above the typical teen party movie genre. While major plot points are standard, it's the small moments in between that make this movie. The best friends are well developed and have great chemistry. The movie also is a message about balancing fun & work while taking the time to talk to the people around you. It's full of awkward moments and misunderstandings which makes the movie relatable.
Watch it.

Review
The opening sets the tone for the movie, a rebellious, confidant decry. I like the hip hop music soundtrack, but in a few years it will be painfully tied to this era. It works for now. The movie that took a surprising turn early in how it presented one of the main characters, Molly. The movie acknowledges that Molly isn't likable, which is surprising. Generally the main character is our window into the story.

Molly is in a bathroom stall and other students begin talking about how they don't like her. You feel bad for her, but when she emerges and confidently tells them how she is better than them you realize how pretentious she is. She belittles them because she got into an Ivy league school and they didn't, but she's shocked to learn she's not the only person from the class to get into a prestigious school.

Most of the time even if the main character is a jerk, they're still the hero. Molly realizes that she thought working hard at school would put her above everyone else and acted like it. It's a nice twist with the movie acknowledging Molly's faults. I completely get why people don't like her.

She is now confronted with the fact that she missed out on having fun in high school, and graduation is tomorrow. She made a mistake. Molly coerces her best friend Amy into making up all they missed by attending a huge party that night.

It's the type of movie where you feel like the writers had to pull from personal experience. The situations and characters, sometimes exaggerated, feel real or based on reality.

Molly and Amy have trouble finding the desired party which is the bulk of the movie's arc, but this is also commenting on the balance required in life. All work or all play creates an imbalance. Not only did Molly and Amy miss out on fun, they missed out on meeting people and making friends. That's the biggest thing they should regret. Just talking to people and being authentic helps you meet people and learn about them.

The concept is a lot of fun. It's a big helping of wish fulfillment because no one ever has this good of a time at a party, but that's also why this genre is popular. This is Can't Hardly Wait (1998) for the 2010s, both are really good.

This felt relatively grounded, but the impediment between them and graduation and how they resolved that was completely wild territory. It's an outlier in a plot that is mostly believable.
This has a lot of the common tropes, but it's the moments in between that make this movie stand out.