Actress Olivia Wilde makes her feature directorial debut with Booksmart, a joyfully vulgar and endlessly witty teen comedy that is destined to go down as an all-time classic. Taking cues from genre pillars like The Breakfast Club and Clueless, Wilde paints a hilarious portrait of high school life that feels specific to this generation while still remaining timeless on a thematic level. Even though we’ve been recently spoiled with an abundance of excellent coming-of-age movies like Lady Bird and Eighth Grade, we have yet another winner on our hands.

We meet best friends and academic overachievers Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) on their final day of high school as they prepare to graduate with top honors. Upon discovering that most of her rambunctious peers were also accepted to prestigious universities, Molly grows envious of their party-hard mentality and vows to make their last night of senior year one to remember. The pair set out on a conquest to find an ever-elusive house party (“We are A+ people going to an A+ party,” Molly asserts) while naturally running into increasingly absurd obstacles along the way.

Penned by an all-female quartet of writers, the masterful script for Booksmart is filled with humor that can be shockingly explicit one minute and then unexpectedly high-minded (indicative of the film’s title) the next. This means that copious amounts of four-letter words and jokes about the human anatomy are tempered with relatively obscure references to famed documentarian Ken Burns and Queen Noor of Jordan. In her first time out as a director, Wilde deftly juggles an impressive array of comedic styles with unfailingly hilarious results.

Atop a talented ensemble of both first-time actors and veteran comedy performers, Dever and Feldstein sport an undeniable chemistry full of charm and warmth that trickles down to the rest of the cast. A chief complaint I had with Superbad, another very funny high school romp to which Booksmart will inevitably be compared, is that the friendship between its two central characters seemed to be rooted more in malice than in mirth. Even at their snarkiest, Amy and Molly always find small but significant ways to empower one another and, in one notable instance, reprimand each other when they occasionally succumb to negative self-talk.

While SNL alums like Will Forte and Wilde’s fiancé Jason Sudeikis turn up in amusing adult roles, the cast of the film is mainly made up of fresh faces who make the most of their time on screen. Billie Lourd, the daughter of the late Carrie Fisher, is a scene-stealing highlight as a relentless party girl who continues to pop up mysteriously throughout the night. Molly Gordon is similarly terrific as a character who seems to fit the “mean girl” mold early on until a pivotal monologue reveals greater depths to her character. As a high school comedy that both invigorates the genre and reminds us why it’s such an enduring one in the first place, Booksmart succeeds with flying colors.

Score – 4.5/5

Also coming to theaters this weekend:
Aladdin, starring Mena Massoud and Will Smith, is another live-action Disney remake of a animated classic about an affable thief who hopes to win the heart of a princess with the help of a magical genie.
Brightburn, starring Elizabeth Banks and David Denman, inverts the traditional superhero origin story and depicts a child from another planet who comes to use his powers for evil instead of good.
Opening at Cinema Center is Hail Satan?, a documentary that traces the recent rise of The Satanic Temple, which is regarded as one of the most controversial religious movements in American history.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup