"Bottoms" punches nice high school comedies in the face

Bottoms (2023)

Raunchy, brazen, and often anarchic, “Bottoms” plays like a meaner, more progressive distant cousin to a John Hughes comedy with a shot of “Fight Club.” Director Emma Seligman co-wrote the script with her friend and collaborator Rachel Sennott (the lovable rising star after standing out in the ensemble of “Bodies Bodies Bodies”) as their sophomore effort to Seligman’s 2021 writing-directing feature debut “Shiva Baby.” Whereas that indie was an anxiety attack framed through a twentysomething Jewish girl’s experience, but also very funny, “Bottoms” is just as specific and funny, albeit in a much rowdier, R-rated sex comedy kind of way. 

Sennott and Ayo Edebiri ("Theater Camp" and TV's "The Bear") play PJ and Josie, two unpopular lesbian friends in their senior year of high school who know their place. Because they both don’t know how to talk to their respective cheerleader crushes, Brittany (Kaia Gerber, dead-ringer daughter of Cindy Crawford) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), their lives are over. That is until Josie simply offers Isabel a ride away from cheating quarterback boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) during an argument, and though not a single punch is thrown, the rumor around school the next day is that Josie beat him up. This stretched truth—and a little white lie that they killed girls in juvie—makes PJ and Josie look like badasses and spirals into them starting a girls’ self-defense club (read: a fight club where girls go wild and throw punches). If they can get Brittany and Isabel to join, maybe they can get into their cheer skirts, too.

Up front, “Bottoms” establishes a distinctly heightened tone. It’s profane and hyper-verbal but also just plain absurd. Comparisons to “Heathers,” "American Pie," “Mean Girls,” “Superbad,” and “Booksmart” are apt, but there’s a singularity to the tone. Some high school comedies try to be as accurate as possible, while “Bottoms” commits to being set in its own casually loony alternate reality. The football players live in their jerseys and shoulder pads. The principal can get away with calling PJ and Josie “the ugly, untalented gays” when having them report to his office over the PA system. In the background of a classroom, there’s a football player in a cage. Class also lasts approximately two minutes. Oh, and there’s a, um, fight club after school? Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies.com

Grade: B +

MGM released “Bottoms” (88 min.) in select theaters on August 25, 2023, followed by a wide release on September 1, 2023.