“Can there be any doubt by now that Richard Linklater is America’s most relaxed and quietly ambitious filmmaker? After all but reinventing the coming-of-age movie with his 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood… the director now serves up a deceptively simple comedy. Everybody Wants Some!! is about nothing more (or less) than the weekend shenanigans that transpire on a Texas college campus in August 1980. The school’s rowdy baseball team returns, welcoming freshman pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner, a clear-eyed find) with the kind of genial hazing – ‘fuck-with-ery’, the newbie calls it – that brings to mind Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (NZIFF94). Bongs will be lit. Pink Floyd will be discussed.
But amid the squad’s constant game playing (and knuckle flicking and disco dancing and co-ed hunting), Linklater embarks on yet another subtle narrative experiment…
After incorporating so much bro-centric bickering, [he] widens out to include the drama students and one special thespian (Zoey Deutch) who, on her lonesome, sends the movie into Boyhood’s euphoric zone of incipient adulthood. It’s Linklater in a nostalgic mood – but also his most deeply felt piece of growing up.” - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out
