A coming-of-age film with your typical setting and conflict. Two best friends in their senior year finally experience the teenage dream: reckless partying. However, Molly and Amy aren’t your typical students. They’re academic overachievers who both are intending Ivy League colleges and not giving a crap about what their classmates say about them. Little do they know, those same wild classmates of theirs will be attending prestigious colleges like them. The night before their graduation, Molly and Amy make one final attempt to have the real high school experience.
First things first, I LOVED Beanie Feldstein (Molly). Her acting was phenomenal. Like Saoirse Ronan, she transitioned from comical to dramatic (like she did in Lady Bird) by acting a little bit exaggerated to incorporate a funny and relatable tone. She goes beyond what a director would expect to emphasize a scene. Little did I know after this movie, Feldstein is Jonah Hill’s sister…!
As the storyline went on, I realized at the end that every scene, character, dialogue present was of importance and necessary that it will eventually build to a bigger, important plot of the film (pizza delivery man). So how if a scene or dialogue seems unnecessary and taking up the film’s time, trust me, it’s worth it for the overall storyline or overall intended elements of the film (comedy).
The characters’ background and expectations of high school seem too unrealistic (at least from where I’m from). We learn that Gigi, “Triple A”, and Nick, just to name a few, all got in highly competitive colleges where the lowest acceptance rate school for them was about 20%. The writing gives examples of the most irresponsible, reckless students of the graduating class coincidentally getting accepted into the same schools as the students who barely left their studies. Although it’s just a film and this plot is a major element to the movie, this causes it to lose its relatable, realistic expectations a little bit.
The ending was phenomenal, however. Films typically follow a trend of sentimental, cliché endings leaving the audience to be left unease with what will happen to these characters. Booksmart’s ending starts like that until the audience is hit with a second climax of hopefulness, comical and that everything’s gonna be alright. For a film with such a generic storyline seen in films all the time, this film’s element of surprise and relatable aspect allows it to be a worth-watching movie.
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