That’s What I’m Talking About: Linklater’s Still Dazed, Not Confused

“We came for a good time, not a long time”

-Charlie Willoughby

Richard Linklater’s 1994 Dazed and Confused showed a day-in-the-life of outgoing middle schoolers and high school seniors and the ensuing fun they had before having responsibilities and adulthood thrust upon them. For audiences that was the assumption. Everyone drives off to the Aerosmith concert and, therefore, into their happily ever after.

That’s where Everybody Wants Some comes in. Being described as a ‘spiritual sequel’ to Dazed and Confused, Wants Some stands as living continuation of Linklater’s themes of the innocence of youth, bold unique characters, and a driving, relevant soundtrack.

Blake Jenner’s Jake Bradford opens the film right where Matthew McConaughey’s driving into the sunrise left off. He arrives at the baseball team’s school houses where he meets a motley crew of beer swigging, clean cut 20-somethings that automatically take the freshmen under their wings and shows him what it means to be a winning team both on and off the field. From tactics to picking up liberated college girls, to high life ideas, to how to adapt to any kind of party. The philosophies of Glen Powell’s Finn, a chameleon-esque lady’s man, shows Jake both good and bad examples of how to enjoy his college experience via the power imbued on the baseball team. Cast with both real minor league ball players as well a bullpen of new, relatively unknown actors, the main players of Wants Some all exude overt-masculinity without coming off as mean or jerkish (most of the time).

The point of savoring the times we have when we’re young runs strong as a theme throughout. Linklater never makes it a point to get overly sentimental but always finds a means for his characters to come off as genuine and matter of factly, as if the movie were just a personal experience he was telling us in person. From a simpler time, if you’re looking for all the fun of a kegger in two hours of movie, take a look at this new Linklater classic because he knows Everybody Wants Some…