PJ, by contrast, has set her sights on Brittany (Kaia Gerber), who has an eating disorder as well as a conviction that she’s straight. ![]() Her wooing of Isabel starts with tearing down Isabel’s wall of conventionality, and Ayo Edebiri makes us feel every tremor of Josie’s desire to connect. They represent a radically different approach to fighting prejudice - PJ the ringleader, flip and pitiless, content to use her wit as a form of destruction, and Josie the more insecure and open. And PJ and Josie aren’t just buddies with different flavors. ![]() G., who is caught between his empathy and his rage against feminism, are stunningly funny the former NFL star Marshawn Lynch plays him with a voluble conviction that keeps on giving. The scenes with the students and their teacher, Mr. She blows up the experience of high school like a toxic balloon. Yet Seligman, who wrote the scabrous screenplay with her lead actor, Rachel Sennott (the star of “Shiva Baby” as well as a costar of “Bodies Bodies Bodies”), is onto something: the way that those who have been forced to see themselves as outsiders project their alienation onto everything around them. In the outside world, it may prove to be a more challenging breed of wild-dog conversation piece. It feels like a quintessential SXSW movie, and in its premiere last night went over big. She has made a comedy of vicious gamesmanship, at once confessional and surreal. “Bottoms” is a more confident and audacious piece of work, in part because Seligman has left realism behind. This is the second feature directed by Emma Seligman, whose first film, “Shiva Baby” (2021), was a critical darling, though I found it at once overdone and unconvincing. They need to pummel their way into being seen. The fight club, the faking of identity, the vengeance - PJ and Josie have launched all this because their lives don’t feel real to them. “Bottoms,” at moments, evokes the barb-wire camp of “But I’m a Cheerleader” crossed with the scandalous misanthropy of “Heathers.” Yet unlike those movies, this one has a teasing humanity that sneaks up on you. As “Total Eclipse of the Heart” unfolds on the soundtrack (Jeff is listening to it on his headphones, convinced, like the bully he is, that he’s a sensitive dude), Hazel attaches a bomb to his car, and it blows up real good. When Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the scurviest of them as well as the boyfriend of Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), who Josie has a thing for, gets caught sleeping with the mother of Hazel (Ruby Cruz), a fight-club member, the girls visit his home for some payback. Some of the antagonists are the Vikings, the high-school football team, who are never not wearing their uniforms and who function as a deranged sendup of the patriarchy - think John Hughes villains played by the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. PJ and Josie approach their lockers, which have been spray-painted with numbered defamatory epithets, and Josie says, “What, I got Faggot #1 this time?” There are jokes about bulimia, rape, suicide and blowing up the school. It walks a tightrope between sensitivity and insanity (with a knowing bit of inanity), and it’s full of moments that are defiantly what we once used to call incorrect. It’s a satire of victimization, a satire of violence, and a satire of itself. ![]() “Bottoms” is unlike any high-school comedy you’ve ever seen. What’s going on is that the movie is getting punch-drunk. We laugh, but we also think: What’s going on here? ![]() And when they get to the fight-club part, letting out their aggression, the jabs are shockingly violent. They build the club around a scurrilous and rather ridiculous lie: that they’ve both spent time in “juvie.” Sitting around in the gym, with a handful of the “normal” girls they’ve roped into joining the club, all of them share stories about the men they’ve had to fend off (stalkers, pervy stepfathers, you name it). In “Bottoms,” PJ and Josie, in the time-honored tradition of teen-movie protagonists out to lose their virginity, are just looking for a way to sleep with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. It’s modeled (sort of) on the one in “Fight Club,” though the movie isn’t particularly interested in that film, where the characters staged bare-knuckle brawls out of a kind of self-serious macho romantic doomsday nihilism. So they do what anyone in their position might do. They’re losers, they’re lonely, they’re lesbians - and in their eyes, that puts them beneath the bottom of the food chain. In “ Bottoms,” a high-school comedy that is brazenly gonzo, scaldingly and at times even dementedly over-the-top, and actually about something, PJ ( Rachel Sennott) and Josie ( Ayo Edebiri) have been best friends since the first grade, but in their senior year at Rock Ridge High they’re at the end of their tether.
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