You know how sometimes you don’t even know you need something in your life, and then you stumble across it and you can’t imagine how you EVER lived without it? That’s how I feel about the movie Bottoms (2023). Yesterday, I hadn’t really considered if my life needed a movie about two queer and unpopular best friends who, to squirm their way out of trouble, invent a self-defense club to empower girls, which they really hope will just finally help them attract the attention of the two hot girls they have crushes on. But now? I’m not sure how I got along all this time without this weird, complex, smart, and raunchy high school romp—not a moment of which sags or bags under the weight of its own ideas or conceits—that allows girls to be seen as selfish, funny, lustful, contradictory, powerful, and absolutely absurd. The boys are pretty funny, too.
When we meet best friends PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) they are, as is so often the case in stories like this one, on the cusp of a new school year, which PJ thinks will finally be THE one where they’re going “get in the cooch,” but Josie is, to say the least, slightly more skeptical. At the fair that night, where everyone from school is out to see and be seen, they are treated with the usual level of disinterest and disdain, which seems to prove Josie right.
But then a few important things happen that will change their lives forever. Well, things happen, and then they make a lot of individual choices, which in turn will lead to…never mind, you get the point. First, they run into their friend Hazel (Ruby Cruz), who makes awkward an art form and takes everything very literally. So, when she’s throwing out guess after guess as to why Josie’s arm is in a sling and PJ responds sarcastically, “Yeah, we went to juvie…” Hazel absolutely thinks it’s a true statement. But before they can correct her, if they can even be bothered, a man on the PA system yells for everyone to “get ready, get wild, and get horny for Jeff!” Suddenly, they’re pushed aside by the high school football team, as the quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) takes the stage to cheers of things like, “fill me with your seed” and “ sign my tits.” The team is called the Vikings, by the way. Oh, did you think that “get horny” meant something else? Ha. Of course it does! Second, after having a wildly awkward conversation with their unrequited crushes, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber)—who, yes, are cheerleaders—which ends with PJ and Josie handing them all their tickets for the fair, the pair retreat to the safety of Josie’s car to mope and regroup.
Third, just as Josie finishes a long diatribe that starts with her “packing up her vagina” and ends with her sobbing about how the “deacon’s fucking the evangelist” (it all makes sense in context), PJ overhears Isabel yelling at Jeff for flirting with other women. PJ encourages Josie to offer Isabel a ride, which she does. Once Isabel is inside the car, Jeff plants his hands on the hood and refuses to move, while vacillating between yelling and pleading with Isabel. Eventually, everyone is screaming and Jeff still won’t move so, hoping to get him to budge, Josie inches the car forward. But he still doesn’t step aside, and when the bumper barely taps his knees, he falls back like a great Redwood finally felled. (My deepest apologies to Redwoods for this simile.)
Sensing Jeff’s pain, his friend and fellow football player Tim (Miles Fowler), who is still inside the fairgrounds, pauses mid-corndog-bite, turns with a look of anguish, and cries out “Jeff.” Then, he runs his arms and legs pumping up and down as he shouts, “Jeffery, I’m coming! You are not alone!” Of course, the rest of the team is right at his heels as he rushes to his friend’s side. Once there, he pulls Jeff onto his lap and cradles him in his arms as rest of the team hovers around them. (Think La Pietà and you’ll be in the right ballpark.) Amidst the chaos, Josie and PJ get the fuck out of Dodge.
The next day at school, PJ is still waxing poetic about the non-conversation she and Brittany had about how Brittany wouldn’t eat a hot dog, but Josie notices that everyone is giving them more dirty looks than usual. Soon enough… Well, not before, like, twelve other witty, absurd, and hilarious things happen, because this feels like the kind of movie you could rewatch a bazillion times and keep finding small things. It feels like there are several layers of movie, which I don’t say to sound like I actually know what I’m talking about, but to say that there is always something else going on in the background, like things on hallway banners, and words written on chalkboards. And then there are their teacher Mr. G’s (Marshawn Lynch) comments, asides, references, and rants, which could likely be a review all their own.
Anyway, back to what I was talking about. Rumor has spread that Josie and PJ beat up Jeff, which gets them called into the principal’s office for committing a crime against “[o]ur quarterback and the most good-looking all-American, red-blooded, muscular man this town has ever seen.” Which brings us to something I love about this movie, which is how everyone appears to just speak their thoughts. And also how bluntly this movie manages to skewer and satirize norms and ideals with the simplest words. Anyhow, put on the spot, Josie and PJ tell the principal they were practicing for their self-defense club, which does not exist.
Josie thinks it will stop there, but PJ sees this as an opportunity to capitalize on other girls’ fear of violence, to draw them closer, and, to eventually and most importantly, get into their pants. Hazel jumps in to add that she thinks it’s a good idea because “there’s a serious lack of female solidarity at this school.” PJ just hangs her head in disgust before saying, “Not the point, Hazel. Not the point.” (Though, she will, of course, go on to use exactly these words to try to get hot girls to sign up for the club.) And, thus is born the fight club. Is it a ludicrous premise? Absolutely! Which is exactly what makes it so fantastic. How often do we get to see high school girls, let alone queer high school girls, do things that are initially driven by their own selfish sexual desires? Teenage girls are almost always portrayed as wanting love, relationships, and comfort, which are all real desires, but so are hormones and the first rush of sexual desires. And so is the self-centeredness of being a teenager.
They have to get a teacher to be their advisor, so they ask Mr. G, who does things like ask them to act out the Treaty of Versaille, to read bell hooks, and to write essays on Murdered Women in History, all the while, while he reads Divorced and Happy, a magazine with a woman’s ass clad only in a thong. One minute he’s hyping up feminism and the next he’s saying how women are evil. He’s a good representation of all the absolutely conflicting messages out there in the world about women, womanhood, and feminism, and how easily alliances shift based on a woman’s perceived good or bad behavior. But I also liked the way they handled toxic masculinity in this movie. Jeff, who is so revered, is often portrayed as a fragile, delicate kind of child, held up and insulated from the world by his teammates. He doesn’t handle his own lunch tray. During practices he tackles other players by lightly tapping them on the shoulder. It’s unclear if he’s really hurt by the car or just pretending, but it doesn’t matter because the outside response is the same. Meanwhile, the principal’s reaction to a girl getting punched in the face by a member of the rival homecoming team is to encourage everyone to “keep their heads in the game.” Still, it’s really Tim who is quietly brilliant throughout the movie for the way he portrays Jeff’s supportive, ever present and much smarter friend, who is determined not to let the fight club overshadow the glory of the guys. And it’s Tim who delivers the utterly devastating line that sums up so much of what this movie, through all its absurdity and humor and violence, is fighting against: “It is such a shame. We were really rooting for you girls.” Gah.
But back to the girls, who do come out to join the self-defense club that they do not realize is really a way for PJ to get hot and sweaty with girls she might want to bang. None of them have a clue what they’re doing but, because of Hazel, they all believe that Josie and PJ spent hard time in juvie, so they follow their lead in punching each other in the face and basically beating the crap out of each other. Which is oddly cathartic to watch? It felt like watching these teenagers vent their pent-up rage at the world, but perhaps I’m projecting. Is this an odd time to say that I think part of what makes the constant chaos, frenetic pace, and raunchy humor of this movie work so well is that it has an incredibly solid core based on friendship and self-discovery? The chemistry between all the actresses in the fight club is pretty amazing, but especially between PJ and Josie, who just kind of glow in each other’s presence.
The fight club will, of course, flourish before it fails and then perhaps rises to, ahem, fight again. In the process, there will be a lot of busted up faces, some actual empowerment, and a fair amount of self-discovery, as well as some cooch explored, some friendships built, broken, and built again, and perhaps some new hearts twitterpated, and a whole lot of blood shed.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 