PROVOKR Pick: Booksmart

BY: Sue Carswell

I’m north of 40, and I pretty much knew what I’d likely write about Booksmart, a movie that other critics have compared to Superbad gone girl. In the beginning, part of me wanted to walk out. Condom water balloons in the school hallway? Really? Ha. But then something started to draw me in, and I realized I was watching a historic moment in film. Booksmart is not just a good female buddy movie, it’s a great one—and truth be told, it’s probably the most tender, grab-me-by-the-heartstrings cinematic achievements I have seen in a very long time. We’re not witnessing a great love story, but rather one hell of a female friend story up there with Julia and Thelma & Louise and yet so distinctly different. To say this film is written, directed, mostly produced by and starring a group of women, makes me proud beyond measure to see such enlightenment hit the screens even if it took until 2019 to do so. The fact that I am a gay woman makes this film an even bigger draw because it naturally weaves a lesbian storyline into the greater wholeness of the film, and not as a gratuitous sidebar.

In this naughty and delightfully inappropriate version of the coming of age comedy, BFF’s and snooty academic aces, Molly (Beanie Feldstein—the genius sister of Jonah Hill) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever, forever to remember) decide they’ve missed out on four years of good times at LA’s Crockett High. What’s up with their hardly superior high school classmates also getting into good schools like Yale and Columbia? “You guys don’t care about school,” Molly declares in the bathroom aghast that brain dead party classmates are going off to Ivies, too. Instead of a rad night watching a Ken Burns flick, Molly and Amy decide to ace Partying 101 on the eve of graduation by doing everything they could have spread out over four years in one night. (Their previous debauchery included going to an all-night college with a fake ID.) Valedictorian-Supreme Court Justice-wannabe Molly convinces Amy—a lesbian who hasn’t popped a bean yet—to try the cool kids’ scene with her to see what they’ve been missing. They hit one party and try hallucinogenics in the form of strawberries. Then they make it to the movie’s big party and it’s there that they come into being who they truly are; awkward teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, in all its spectacular glory.

Forget the Ancestry DNA; Billie Lourd scioness of scene stealer, Carrie Fisher and uber agent Bryan Lourd—comes scream queening into her own. Lourd’s character Gigi sprouts up everywhere. “She is who I would be if no one was watching,” Lourd recently said. “She’s my id…Gigi is me at my prime.”

The film has been some 10 years in the making. Which leads me to ask the obvious. Why?

Booksmart is actress-turned-director, Olivia Wilde’s jaw dropping turn-around and what a mesmerizing directorial debut it is. Lourd calls her, “the pinnacle of dope.” I’m going to label her, an Academy Award-winning director in the making if this doesn’t at least get her a nomination. Brava to Wilde, and all the women who so smartly have just rewritten the books of film and its trailblazing lead into our future.