Baseball, Baby!

Richard Linklater, with his second film, created one of the best hang out movies of all time. Whether you think it hyperbole to call it one of the best films ever, one of the greatest comedies, or whatever other “all time great” descriptors you can think of, there’s no denying that with his large, ensemble movie about kids enjoying the summer of 1976, he hit it out of the park. It’s a fantastic film to put on and enjoy for a nice, mellow time as the students of Lee High in Austin, Texas celebrated their freedom. Dazed and Confused has gone on to be considered by many to be one of the best films of 1993, as well as a fantastic work in Linklaters long and storied career, and yet it absolutely bombed when it was released in theaters, barely making over its small budget and then getting ignored until it arrived on home video. ANd that was where the cult for the film grew and developed until it was reappraised and acknowledged as the classic it truly was.

In the years since, Linklater has stated his love for his film. He complained bitterly about how the film was marketed, how Gramercy Pictures dropped the ball in handling his movie, their ineptitude essentially killing it in theaters. He’s right to be mad, of course, even if I do think Dazed and Confused is a hard movie to summarize in a trailer. But as the fandom for the film grew, and more and more came to acknowledge just how good the movie was, eventually Linklater was able to go back and revisit the concept (if not the characters) of the movie by crafting a spiritual sequel: Everybody Wants Some!!

This film, set just at the end of summer in 1980, follows two days with the incoming baseball team at a Texas college. They spend the two days hanging out, drinking, smoking, partying, and cruising for girls, all while slowly getting ready for the life ahead of them in college. It’s another light and breezy time following characters around as they generally just enjoy freedom without constraints, although the changes in perspective – college instead of high school, end of summer instead of the start of it – does add a different tone to the overall movie.

The film focuses primarily on Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner), an all-state pitcher in high school who comes to play on the best college team in the state. There he meets the upperclassmen on the team – Glen Powell as Finnegan, Ryan Guzman as Kenny Roper, Temple Baker as Tyrone Plummer, and Tyler Hoechlin as Glen McReynolds – along with incoming freshmen Beuter (Will Brittain) and Brumley (Tanner Kalina). Jake gets settled into his room before being quickly whisked off to cruise for chicks and drink some beers. Along the way he gets introduced to Beverly (Zoey Deutch) towards whom he instantly feels a connection.

The next two days are a blur of parties and fun as the guys go from disco joints to country bars, baseball parties to theater parties. They meet up with old friends and end up at a punk rock concert, get kicked out of a club, and nearly get into a brawl in a parking lot. Through all of this, Jake learns what it means to be part of the new team while also quickly realizing that he’s no longer the best on the team, the big fish in the small pond. Everyone at the school earned their right to be there, they were all the big fish in their ponds before they came here, and now Jake has to figure out what it means to be a player on this new team, just another guy in this new world he’s moved to.

Although Everybody Wants Some!! Plays similarly to Dazed and Confused, they are not the exact same movie. Their forms may be the same, but the two films vary differently in tone. Dazed and Confused focused on an endless summer ahead, full of hope for all the parties that could come, the joy of just being free. Everybody Wants Some!!, though, sets up a school year ahead, and while it filters the experiences of the characters through an endless string of parties and freedom, it does also say, “hey, you’re going to have to buckle down eventually. Life isn’t going to be an endless series of parties forever.”

This message is both conveyed, and maybe obscured a little, by the upperclassmen. On the one hand, they are the ones encouraging all the partying and slacking off over the summer. It’s the off-season, the time to relax and live life. At the same time, though, they’re also the ones leading the team and letting everyone know, “you’re going to have to work.” The characters coming in think they’re hot shit, but they quickly learn everyone on the team is hot shit so they can’t just coast. Plus they have classes, and homework, and life to look forward to. Freedom is only there for the couple of days they have left before college starts up.

Hell, the film even finds a way to emphasize, subtly, that college is the last chance all of these guys have to just be free and not worry as much about what comes next. Jake comes in not sure exactly what he’s going to do, outside of college, never even answering what his degree will be when people ask. Meanwhile Wyatt Russell plays Charlie Willoughby, a transfer student from California who, we eventually learn, is actually a 30 year old man trying to get back to college to play ball again. He doesn’t want to be an adult, he doesn’t want to go out into the world, he just wants to try and make it as a ball player once more. Life outside of school is hard, the film says, so enjoy these years while you can.

Everybody Wants Some!! ends up with a far more melancholic tone than Dazed and Confused because it hits that the end of this phase of life is coming. The students have to actually start thinking about what’s next. They have to find their degree, they have to handle their workload, they have to try. Some of them aren’t going to make it on the team, and then that means their scholarships would be in trouble. Life could come for them really fast, and if they’re going to make it they have to put in real effort. That stands in contrast to the partying we see throughout the two days before college, but it’s there. We know what’s next. Jake and the rest of the team will eventually find out as well.

From that perspective Everybody Wants Some!! Is a successful film. With that said, it does have flaws that stand out, especially when contrasted with Dazed and Confused. Where that prior film gave us perspectives from a lot of characters, seniors and freshmen, jocks and nerds, boys and girls, Linklaters spiritual sequel keeps its focus trained on our select group of baseball players. There’s only one main female character in the film, Beverly, and she’s there for Jake to pursue. We meet a number of side characters, but none of them get any kind of real focus. Everyone that matters to the story of the movie is a baseball player on the team so we don’t really get the depth of stories that Dazed and Confused provided.

And, really, there isn’t nearly as much story to Everybody Wants Some!!, either. The movie is about Jake, no matter how many other characters we meet and see and follow, and he’s the only guy that gets any kind of arc. It would have been nice, with this wide cast of characters, to maybe see a few B- and C-plots play out over the course of the film to give more evolution, further arcs for the characters. I understand this film takes place over just two days, and there is only so much growth characters can realistically have in that time, but for the kind of film we have here I needed just a little more from many of the characters to feel like I really bonded with them. Dazed and Confused made it easy to settle in and enjoy the characters, but that’s not as easy to do here.

I think Everybody Wants Some!! Is a good film, but I also don’t hold it up to the same standard as Dazed and Confused. It’s a different kind of movie, with a different perspective, but it also just isn’t quite as successful. I like it, but I don’t love it, and it’s not a film I want to revisit anywhere near as often, either.