Just got back from watching this with my college-age daughter and we had a blast. The previous film from Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennot was Shiva Baby, a hotbox of social horror. This is lighter and more surreal–a punk-rock Mean Girls.
I didn’t realize that Sennot and Ayo Edebiri (a star of the best show on tv, The Bear) had made a short series for Comedy Central called Ayo and Rachel Are Single–thank you, Alamo Drafthouse pre-show–but here they’re playing PJ and Josie, self-declared “ugly and untalented lesbians” in high school. They form an all-girl fight club in an attempt to impress their cheerleader crushes. The logic behind this development isn’t important; because there is none. The high school milieu here is chaotic, violent, and misogynist (but surprisingly cool with the gays) from the principle down to the over-hyped football team.
Marshawn Lynch’s Mr. G becomes the fight club’s faculty sponsor who can’t decide if he wants to be enlightened in his allyship or not. Practically every scene is punctuated by his mugging, whether recoiling in shock at what the girls get up to, or shaking his head judgmentally, but he never steps in to pull the crew toward sanity. These girls are, fortunately or unfortunately, unsupervised. (Practically the only other adult is played by the ravishing Dagmara Dominczyk, but she’s mostly a plot device.)
Ruby Cruz (recently from the new Willow show, apparently) stands out among the remaining fight club members as Hazel, an enthusiastic and uncommonly level-headed denizen of this mad world… when she’s not dabbling with high explosives.
The motley crew of girls marches through the absurdity to an utterly and self-consciously contrived save-the-day scenario that clearly stretched the film’s budget beyond its limit. But a believable plot and a big budget aren’t the point. This is a portrait of two resident superfreaks in a world of normal freaks. It’s Booksmart with the wheels off (and maybe one missing, the axle throwing sparks as it scrapes the pavement). Bottoms is a ride.
