Booksmart

"You're at a ten. I need you at a two," a character tells a young man who is wildly overacting. I think that's a fair description of Booksmart, which I wanted to like desperately but is not as good as the reviews suggest.

The film is most reminiscent of Superbad and Lady Bird, as befits its star, Beanie Feldstein, who is Jonah Hill's sister and played Saoirse Ronan's best friend in Lady Bird. Here she is the class president and valedictorian of a high school in Los Angeles. Her best friend is the equally smart Kaitlyn Dever, who is also an out-of-the-closet lesbian. They have spent all their waking hours on schoolwork, determined to get into the best schools (Dever is taking a gap year to go to Africa to make tampons) but when Feldstein finds out that those she think are idiots are also getting into good schools, she is determined to spend the night before graduation going to a party.

Like Superbad, it takes place over one 24-your period, as Feldstein and Dever overcome a series of obstacles to get to the best party, thrown by a fellow whom Feldstein may just have a crush on. Along the way they find out things about other students that prove the general belief that you never really know anyone else, and also sort out the difficulties in their own relationship (Feldstein is the dominant one, while Dever just tags along).

But there are problems with this script. I haven't been to high school in 40 years, but I have a hard time believing this is what it is like now. Booksmart is not realistic; it is hyperreal, with gross exaggerations. A student who is extremely wealthy tries to buy friendships, to the extent that he throws a party on a yacht (if this were a public school, I doubt a kid that rich would attend it, and would instead go to a private school). His friend (Billie Lourd, looking a lot like Kate Hudson) is a drama queen who has the ability to turn up everywhere. The girls try to find out the address of the party by pretending to be criminals and hijacking a pizza delivery guy's car. And while Dever is not presented as a cliche, the two gay male characters are flaming stereotypes.

But I'll forgive a lot for a movie that celebrates smart kids. Dever has a sign on her door that pays homage to Virginia Woolf, and they use "Malala" as a kind of safe word to indicate the other must heed and pay attention. While I never bought Feldstein as a high school student (as usual, all of these actors are too old to play 18-year-olds, in the Beverly Hill 90210 syndrome) the rapport between her and Dever is good, as this film is essentially about female friendship.

Other things I found good were Jason Sudeikis as the school principal, whom the girls discover drives for Lyft (and after listening to the sounds of two women having sex, he asks, "Is that Cardi B?") and a sequence in which, under the influence of drugs, they hallucinate that they are Barbie Dolls ("I have no genitals!" one exclaims).

The director is Olivia Wilde, who shows some promise but is wildly uneven. I would have preferred less of the shotgun effect and a more calibrated take on what it's like to be a smart girl today, as well as the new normal, where students can be out (that was unheard of in my day) and that gender fluidity is more accepted. But Booksmart is a step in the right direction.