I spent a lot of last summer guiltily avoiding raunchy comedies starring women. As much as I enjoy and want to support these filmmakers, raunchy comedies and I just don't get along. Then came "Bottoms," directed by Emma Seligman and starring Rachel Sennott, and written by both of them. There were an awful lot of other actors I liked on the cast list too, so I sucked it up and watched the movie.
Besties PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edibiri) are "ugly, untalented gays," which put them at the bottom of the high school pecking order. They want to lose their virginities to hot cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), and come up with the idea to start a women's self-defense club under the sketchy guidance of their teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch). This attracts a group of other female outcasts - Hazel (Ruby Cruz), Annie (Zamani Wilder), and Sylvie (Summer Joy Campbell) among them. This also attracts the ire of the football team, lead by star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and his best friend Tim (Miles Fowler).
"Bottoms" is a very self-aware satire of high school sex comedies, purposefully built on a pile of absurd clichés that are sometimes called out, and sometimes just background visual gags that get more and more insane as the film goes on. You have the football players and cheerleaders constantly in uniform no matter what the situation, it's impossible to tell what subject Mr. G teaches, and the high school football rivalry is ramped up to truly deranged extremes. The violence, however, is what caught my attention. In most comedies of this type, a lot of the big laughs come from raunch, gross out, and embarrassment humor. "Bottoms" has some of this, but the overwhelming source of laughs is violence. Boy, does "Bottoms" have a lot of violence, from the fight club to the football antics to a prank war. And while a lot is exaggerated, there's an unusual brutality in the way Seligman shows it. Even simple punches can cause bloody injuries, and there's a sequence of someone getting viciously beat up that is as horrifying as it is ridiculous.
And that attitude is why I think "Bottoms" works so well. It calls out misogyny, bigotry, and bullying without sugarcoating them, at the same time that it's mining these topics for humor. The bullies behave in absurd ways, but the damage they deal to our heroes is very real. The F-slur is thrown around constantly, but not casually. There's a joke about sexual assault that's designed to make you wince at the same time you're laughing. The film stops occasionally for someone to nudge the fourth wall, and point out something happening that doesn't make sense, but then rolls with the punches anyway. For me, it also helps that "Bottoms" isn't much of a sex comedy. PJ and Josie sort out their priorities and get the girls in the end, but their own self-improvement and decision to use violence for a good cause take up most of their attention in the last act. And I, for one, thought it was funny as hell.
If nothing else, watch this movie for the cast. Like the heroes of "Superbad," who they have a lot in common with, PJ and Josie are lovable, but also awful. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edibiri do a fantastic job of playing terrible liars and pathetic con-artists. I don't buy for a second that they're high schoolers, but I got invested in their friendship. Hazel, the earnest, wide-eyed true believer, is somehow Ruby Cruz's film debut, and Nicholas Galitzine takes a break from rom-com princes to play one of the dimmest, silliest screen himbos I've ever seen. However, the MVP of the film may be Marshawn Lynch, who delivers his line readings with irresistible sincerity.
I left "Bottoms" very happy that I had taken a chance on it. This still is definitely not my genre, but I like that we're seeing female-led comedies like this and "Booksmart" come around more often. And if Emma Seligman and company decide they want to make more movies in this vein, I'll happily stick around.
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