Review: Bottoms

Director:  Emma Seligman

Stars:  Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, Ruby Cruz

Anticipating this movie in the UK has been a rollercoaster lately. For those of us swept up in the unbridled anxiety of Shiva Baby, the prospect of another team-up from Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott was already huge. Then the trailer for Bottoms promised their take on the broad US teen comedy and expectations flew up further (buoyed by early word-of-mouth). Then potential disaster. It looked like the movie wasn’t going to get theatrical release outside of the US. That it would be relegated to the anonymity of streaming. No Hard Feelings had just lulled us back to bawdy comedy at the cinema. Were the studios really going to take it away again?? No! Because suddenly Bottoms was back on the agenda. And now here we are, wrestling to pin down – easily – one of the most chaotic films of the year.

Displaying gleefully bitter hostility from the get-go, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are two homosexual plutonic besties longing to lose their virginities before school ends. Cue immediate implications of a queer Superbad, potentially in the progressive Booksmart mold. Except, no. That is not Sennott and Seligman’s deal. Bottoms is an agitated, borderline incoherent mix of elements. Not in the hyper-specific pressure-cooker ways of Shiva Baby, but instead in a throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-we’ll-see-what-works kind of way. It’s volatile and deeply unserious, and will likely be embraced for these very qualities. This one has cult written all over it.

After becoming involved in an altercation with dunderhead football jock Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) that gets blown way out of proportion, PJ strikes on the idea of creating an extracurricular fight club for the girls of Rockbridge High, in the hopes that it’ll score the two of them dates with cheerleaders. The girls are not well-liked around campus, sitting squarely on the bottom rung of the social ladder. PJ is generally mean (Sennott tapping that vein but with a great deal less charisma than either Shiva Baby or Bodies Bodies Bodies), while Josie is just all sorts of awkward. As in most high school comedies of this type, their crushes are intangible objects far outside of their frame of reference; idolised but basically unknowns to them.

Acquiring approval from their slumming teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch) and with substantial assistance from wallflower admin friend Hazel (Ruby Cruz), PJ and Josie build their club from a house of cards of lies and exaggerations; the perfect fodder for a tried and tested narrative where everyone learns from their mistakes when the truth inevitably comes out. But everything about Bottoms is slightly off, including its ability to hit these beats with ease. It’s like an ungainly adolescent itself, frequently tripping over its own legs because its not looking where it’s going, uncoordinated and brimming with snark that’s fired indiscriminately in all directions.

Anyone coming to Bottoms for a sports movie will be disheartened by how quickly the ‘fight’ part of the fight club becomes immaterial. Bottoms finds itself with a Pitch Perfect-style collective of quirky misfits finding solidarity and empowerment in one another, but without the verve of actual competition or betterment. Still, when the film does lean into its shock value slapstick violence, its often a quick-fix winner. David Fincher is duly namechecked to ensure we all appreciate that this is a knowing queer variant, and its wryly funny how quickly the club descends into its own version of Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem.

If Fight Club documented traits of toxic masculinity, Bottoms sets its sights on presenting some pretty spurious and toxic feminism, dogged by in-fighting and a perpetually self-hating streak that is nothing if not adolescent. There’s a crystal clear, sobering moment dead in the middle of the film when all the girls in the club admit that they have, at some point, been the victim of a sexual assault. The display of immediate shade and discrimination that follows from within the group feels downright transgressive, though such incidents do occur.

Widening our focus, however, its the building blocks of the story that don’t fit together particularly well. Bottoms charges through them with pace, weaponising this whiplash to push through its randomness, but in the aftermath a lot of its inexplicable elements end up feeling slipshod, from poorly introduced characters to nearly everything about its riotous (and enjoyable) football game finale. It feels a bit like watching a pyramid of cheerleaders collapse.

If Sennott isn’t quite as appealing as we’ve seen previously (deliberately so), her co-star Edebiri shines. Between this, Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse and Theater Camp she’s having a fine year, and it’ll be heartening to see her step out of supporting or sidekick roles and take centre stage with her comedic flex. Someone make this happen, please. Elsewhere, Cruz gives us a lot with relatively little as Hazel, and Havana Rose Liu shows great presence as Isabel, the obscure object of Josie’s desire. Galitzine goes hard as brainless jock Jeff, but the role is underwritten and uninspired, riffing on a trope without adding any new dimensions to it. Jeff becomes pretty boring.

It’s possible that high expectations have dulled the effectiveness of Bottoms, and that re-watches will help it speak its own language, but on an initial pass it registers mostly as messy and lost in translation. Sennott, Seligman and co. clearly have affection for the genre (a hang-out spot called But I’m a Diner feels like a tip to cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader; its menus boasting some great cream pies), and there’s something to be said for trying to exorcise the complicated self-loathing of adolescent queerness. Bottoms is an antidote, at the very least, to the convenient utopianism of Netflix’s Sex Education. But maybe it swings too hard the other way, presenting us a teenage America brimming with frustration and a propensity for violence. I’m left wondering if there’s a potential middle ground classic in the making somewhere.