plug: Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

"We came for a good time, not for a long time."

Listened to the latest ep of the The Big Picture podcast with Richard Linklater and Melissa Maerz, author of the new book Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. And that inevitably got me thinking about Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater’s 2016 “spiritual sequel” to Dazed. Although, to even call it that is to preemptively deprive it of its own merits.

I think about Everybody Wants Some!! a lot. Some movies take up space in your head for longer than you ever expected. Some even hold your attention for the rest of your life. I think several Linklater movies do that because they exhibit a deep concern with time, memory, and the ripple effect of the present, even when they’re fun. Everybody Wants Some!! sort of shares a time, place, and ensemble hangout format with Dazed and Confused, but it benefits visually from the eye of the elder Linklater — making it a more efficiently meditative and ethereal film in line with Boyhood and the Before trilogy. 

Everybody Wants Some!! takes place over one weekend before fall semester at a college in Texas in 1980, following incoming freshman pitcher Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) as he moves into the off-campus baseball house, makes new friends and quasi-enemies on the team, observes the local mating rituals at the club, engages with the local punk scene, and meets his first college love. Overall, low on plot, high on Linklater-brand slice-of-life shit. 

My best friend from high school was a pitcher and played all through college, so we’ve talked about this movie together at length. From what he tells me it’s an incredibly accurate portrayal of the camaraderie, competitive social pecking order, and mix of personalities specific to college baseball. Linklater played baseball in college as well, so there’s clearly a lot of autobiography going on. In interviews for this movie he talks a lot about capturing the vibe of the guys he played baseball with and how these guys were jocks, but they were also witty and smart and projected an attitude that remains an appealing cinematic subject.

“That was part of my motivation to make this, because so few movies are made about athletes. It’s usually “Oh, those are the guys who picked on me.” And baseball players aren’t bullies by and large. Not that they aren’t the same spectrum of male behavior as anyone else, but they’re no worse. Some of that behavior you’re less likely to see in baseball. There are really smart baseball players. It’s a thinking person’s game.”

Linklater does an immaculate job walking a tightrope between nostalgia and unrelenting, hyperrealistic memory — inviting us to hang out with a bunch of charismatic dudes and have a good time with them while also giving us a clear glimpse of young masculinity in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I think very few people could pull this off today, but Linklater recreates and captures behavior from good to benign to reckless to bad in a way that feels both blunt and comically spiritual.

Everybody Wants Some!! is Richard Linklater’s secret magnum opus, and it makes me happy to have only seen its cult fanbase grow since 2016. This is me doing my part to help it grow a little more. Sometimes you turn to movies for viscera and new understanding. Sometimes you’re just looking for a good hang for the space a of a couple hours. With Everybody Wants Some!!, you get both.