A Wise And Warm Summer Comedy
The opening moments of Booksmart, the directorial debut of actress Olivia Wilde, present a question, just by force of viewing habit: What kind of cinematic high-school girl type is this?
Played by Beanie Feldstein, Molly begins her day listening to affirmations about achieving greatness. She goes off to school, where she's class president. She suffers no fools, gladly or otherwise. From these hints, you might guess that in the world of high school movies, she is an Election Tracy Flick type: driven, insufferable, unpopular. But you also see her dance like a goofball with her best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), and then you think ... maybe not. Maybe she is a warm and likable nerd, the underdog type. And at some point, it comes into focus: Neither she nor Amy is any cinematic type at all.
Molly and Amy are best friends who love each other more than anything, who are about to graduate from high school and head off to college. They have both — Molly especially — focused on school, believing (or perhaps telling themselves?) that they were not partying much, not getting too wild, not having the wrong kind of fun, because they were academically driven. But then, Molly learns that some of the kids she's always thought she wouldn't want as friends because they don't care about school are about to go to colleges as good as hers. This shakes her. Perhaps high school, she realizes, is not a choice between academic success and social immersion. Perhaps she has abstained from much of party life for no real reason.
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