Metacritic score: 85 out of 100
Booksmart
The delightful coming-of-age comedy is currently in theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson covered film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
Booksmart is Olivia Wilde’s debut directorial feature, and it’s a very satisfying movie for anyone who was never one of the cool kids. Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein), best friends who’ve spent all of high school in the library aiming to get into Ivy League colleges, discover something shocking the night before graduation. Their classmates — whom they assumed were destined for miserable, meaningless lives — had actually managed to party, have sex, and do dumb things in high school while also getting good grades and getting into those same Ivy League schools.
Amy and Molly determine to shed their “booksmart” ways and have a fun night, and Booksmart follows the pair through a series of mishaps, missed connections, triumphs, sexual discovery, and personal revelations. With shades of Superbad, it’s a movie about friendship and being a good person, about finally copping to what you want, revising your prejudices and assumptions about others, about being brave enough to own up to who you are. And it seems destined, from the start, to become a teen classic.
