Richard Linklater's new film Everybody Wants Some!! is a freewheeling story about the newfound liberation and youthful excesses that accompany college life. The movie, which opens in wide release today, was largely inspired by the director's own college experience, and neatly picks up where his most recent hit, Boyhood, left off.
Billed as the "spiritual successor" to Linklater's 1993 high school coming-of-age classic Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! is set in the dwindling summer of 1980, and tracks the beer-and-testosterone-fueled hijinks of a group of baseball players over the weekend before the beginning of fall semester. Just as Dazed served as a bittersweet reflection on Linklater's "fraught" high school experience in southeast Texas, his latest creation offers a zippy and exuberant translation of his days as a college freshman on the Sam Houston State baseball team.
"It's about identity," Linklater told me following the world premiere screening of Everybody Wants Some!! at Austin's South by Southwest Film Festival in March. "It's about what to do with the freedom you've been given in life. You're not really a free agent in this world until you leave your parents' house, high school, and all that. So developmentally, [college is] a really important time. It's not put to you that way, but it strikes me as figuring out who you are, and kind of accepting your life as your own."
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As the film's wide-eyed main character, a freshman pitcher named Jake (Blake Jenner), rolls onto campus with little more than a car full of LPs, his phase of life overlaps with that of the main character in Boyhood, who is leaving high school and beginning college just as that 2014 movie comes to a close.
"I remember filming the last scene in Boyhood," Linklater said. "I was thinking, 'You know, there's this other film I want to do soon. I hope I get to make it, and it begins right here. The guy shows up at college, meets a girl, new roommate. It kind of totally overlaps with this day I'm filming with you guys. It totally overlaps.' And, sure enough, it just happened that that was the next film I got to do."
On its face, Everybody Wants Some!! plays as an innocent, laugh-a-minute joyride, and a handbook on how to take college life by storm — with marathon partying, skirt-chasing, and monkeying around. But don't mistake all the fun for shallowness. Unlike your average bro comedy, Everybody Wants Some!! — which adopts both the name and the spirit of Van Halen's unforgettably charged rock song — achieves an unexpected resonance, as our protagonist Jake is shaped by the myriad personalities and experiences that greet him on campus.
"I wanted to examine that part in life," Linklater told me. "I had made a high school film years before, and I was ready to make a college film, the follow-up, to see what was different. And guess what? College is more fun than high school. So I think I was less conflicted about that time in my life. To me, it operates at a level, just in my own consciousness, of more… joy. [With] Dazed I was exorcising teenage years, which are a real mixed bag. There was a lot of cruelty in Dazed. There's a lot of harshness in the initiation rituals. And that's part of being a high school kid, you know? There's a lot of angst. And, to me, that's what I meant when I said that's the difference between high school and college: In college, everybody was cool. People aren't picking on you, you know? There aren't fights. It was just, like, more fun. Everyone was there by choice."
When I asked whether he'd want to go back to his own college experience, Linklater said, "I would never want to relive those years. I don't want to go back to any time. I don't really think the past is better, you know?"
But he respects cinema as a nostalgia-evoking medium. "Movies are like dreams," he says. "A movie can park in back and remind you of something in your own past."
