Teen comedies for a sex-positive generation

Having just blown it with her high school crush, Josie (Ayo Edebiri) imagines a future in which she never finds a woman to love, she gets knocked up by a closeted gay man, she is forced to join a church where her gay husband will become the pastor (“sure, his sermons are good, but everyone knows he’s fruity”), their son hates them for their dishonest lives, and she is lonely and alone. It is a tour de force monologue that sets the stage for the wild, raunchy energy of Bottoms (directed by Emma Seligman).

Bottoms leans heavily into the tropes of the quirky high school comedy, in which kids pegged as nerdy losers somehow invert the social hierarchy of high school or at least offer a way out of its terrorizing grip. The structure of this plot device is so well developed in popular culture that it took almost half the movie for me to realize how over the top Bottoms is. The football players wear their uniforms everywhere they go. The school is plastered in posters elevating the quarterback to a semi-divine status. (“He might be watching you right now,” the posters declare.) Adult authority figures are at best checked out and at worst verbally abusive.

The satire is thick and obvious: any culture that prizes hypermasculine sexualized violence is going to get a world built in that image. Everyone, football players and dorky lesbians alike, lusts after the pretty, popular cheerleaders, and everyone talks about sex in violent, possessive terms. When a rumor leads to the nerds being mistaken for juvenile delinquents, they decide to translate their street cred into currency in the high school popularity market. Under the auspices of self defense, they start a fight club for girls. The fight club morphs from a funny gag into a deadly serious endeavor, and by the third act we have left reality entirely behind for an increasingly absurd parable of bloodlust and moral redemption.