Everybody Wants Some!! is a 2016 film written and directed by Richard Linklater.
Linklater has made many movies in his career, with Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Before Sunset, and Boyhood amongst his most well-known works.
Everybody Wants Some!! follows freshman Jake Bradford as he moves into a large off-campus house with his new teammates on the university baseball team.
1. How to quickly establish setting and tone
The movie opens with a series of shots to indicate place and time:
Jake drives on a highway through flat countryside with Texas plates on his car
“My Sharona”, by The Knack, released in 1979, plays on the soundtrack
in the backseat of Jake’s car is a plastic milk crate full of albums
As Jake parks at the fraternity-style house, a title card tells us it’s August 1980 and informs us of the time remaining until classes start.
We follow Jake into the house, and we’re introduced to his teammates as he moves through the building looking for his new bedroom.
Each ballplayer gets off a joke or two at Jake’s expense, quickly establishing the unserious, wisecrack-y tone of the movie.
2. Slapstick works best in limited screen time
Nesbit is a small and wiry older teammate who’s funny in his limited screen time.
He has a dirty blond mustache with slightly up-twisted ends, and at one point wears yellow-tinted, round-framed sunglasses that make him look like a food scientist at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Just looking at Nesbit is amusing.
It’s mainly physical comedy that he brings to his scenes.
Nesbit’s a pitcher and throws in an odd, near-underhand style that fits his personality.
In a mud-wrestling match with a young woman at a house party, he’s quickly down in the muck and easily subdued, much to the joy of onlookers.
My favorite Nesbit scene is when Jake finds him uninvited in his bedroom, flipping through his album collection. Nesbit announces he will “borrow” one of Jake’s records, and Jake becomes mildly annoyed.
Nesbit’s response is to utter half-words and make a series of goblin-esque facial expressions and body movements while he backs into the hallway, album in hand.
While I enjoy Nesbit, an entire film featuring him would probably be too much.
3. Actors can be convincing on-screen athletes
Each of the actors portraying a baseball player had to submit a skills video proving he could play the sport.
The only baseball scene in the movie is a practice Jake goes through with his teammates. All the actors look natural throwing, catching, running, and hitting.
This scene is not crucial to the story, but it is crucial to the believability of the movie.
If a character has an unathletic throwing motion or runs with an awkward gait, it pricks the aura of reality around the movie because the guys tell us repeatedly that they’re the best collection of athletes on campus, better than the football and basketball teams, and it’s implied that they regularly field a competitive team.
If we don’t believe these guys are great, college-level athletes, will we believe anything else in the movie?
4. A minor character can still have an arc
Like Jake, Alex Brumley’s a freshman, new to college and the team.
The way Brumley’s introduced makes it look like he’ll be the butt of all jokes.
He stumbles into a bar, Nesbit riding him piggyback, joining his teammates for mid-afternoon jugs of beer. Brumley’s thin, patchy mustache is made fun of, and he makes a couple awkward comments, like, “Cheers for the beers!”
This scene captures the nervous, overeager energy of a young man meeting a group of cooler, more experienced guys, and trying to figure out how he fits in.
From this low-ish point, Brumley’s integrated into the team, with his older teammates taking him under their collective wings, and imparting useful life lessons to him, like how to properly apply cologne and to never use the bridge when playing pool.
We see Brumley dancing with young women at parties, beating Nesbit in a game of “Knuckles”, and being held upside down for a keg stand by his teammates. He collaborates with his veteran teammates on a gross locker room prank.
Even in the handful of days Everybody Wants Some!! covers, we see that Brumley’s not just a laughingstock, but a young man gradually gaining confidence and finding his place on a new team.
5. Competent male characters are interesting
It would be tempting to make a few of the ballplayers utterly useless off the field.
Yet they are shown to be good at many different things, like talking to women, shooting Nerf hoops, playing ping pong, insulting one another, and dancing in multiple different styles.
Granted, these are mainly physical activities where they can draw on their athleticism.
Still, it suggests that they have a general competence that extends beyond specializing in only one sport.
It would have been easy to follow the dumb jock stereotype and make these guys stupid, too. But there are bright characters, including Jake, Walt “Finn” Finnegan, Dale Douglas, and Charlie Willoughby. They all have interesting things to say.
Overall, the ballplayers are a refreshing change from the weak, incompetent, and uninspiring male characters being churned out in many modern Hollywood movies.
Only pitcher Jay Niles consistently comes across as a self-serious buffoon.
This character refers to himself as “raw dog”, wears large-lensed glasses, sports a little boy’s moppy haircut, openly lies about how many women he’s danced with at the club, and starts a fight with the bartender over how his screwdriver is prepared, getting his team thrown out in the process.
Yet we catch a glimpse of Niles looking competent at practice, despite team superstar Glen McReynolds hitting a home run off him.
Like Brumley’s character arc, our expectations are subverted in this scene. We expect McReynolds to just boast a ton about his homer then walk back to the dugout.
Instead, McReynolds calls out Niles as a selfish blowhard in front of the entire team, castigates him for getting everyone thrown out of the club, and tells Niles that “[i]t’s about the team here, it’s not about you.”
This is an instance of competent male leadership.
It reveals that there’s more depth to McReynolds than we initially thought. He’s more concerned with team success than piling up his own personal statistics and making it to the big leagues.
On the other hand, Niles is constantly talking about going pro. He’s dreaming about his big league future, while McReynolds is focused on the team’s present.
We’re reminded that McReynolds is the team captain, the one in charge of running this players-only practice that takes place well before the start of the regular season.
Despite his public scolding, Niles later approaches McReynolds and apologizes.
After practice, the guys are together at a swimming hole, floating in inner tubes. Niles jumps off a high tree and into the water to the sound of his cheering teammates.
This suggests that Niles is willing to put aside his ego, at least for now, and become an integrated member of the team, and that his teammates want him to join them.
Perhaps with McReynolds’ leadership, Niles will stay on track, help the team throughout the season, and resist becoming a completely self-absorbed fool.
6. Men bond through competition
The young men in Everybody Wants Some!! compete at everything.
Besides baseball, they make dumb bets with each other, practice putting, play made-up drinking games, ping pong, Nerf basketball, driveway basketball, “Knuckles”, foosball, darts, pool, a primitive handheld video game, and so on.
Willoughby even makes smoking marijuana competitive, taking a massive bong hit to impress his new teammates.
Characters in the movie comment on how they compete at everything.
While some viewers might think all this male competition as “toxic”, it actually shows that Linklater understands how men bond.
Men are not built to sit around and talk face-to-face with one another. We need to be doing something together.
Anything.
Years ago, I was holed up in a tiny apartment during a snowstorm with a couple old high school buddies.
We played a game where we took turns tossing our baseball caps across the room, trying to hang them off a door handle.
This went on for at least 30 minutes.
It was completely ridiculous.
But it was totally fun.
That’s men.
Another reason guys compete and verbally spar with each other is to check how capable the other men around us are. You want to know that if something goes sideways, the dude next to you can actually help you out.
If you overreact to an insult or spazz out after losing a game, you’re marked out as unreliable. Other men won’t want to be around you in a tense situation.
Finally, men compete against each other within their group in smaller games and activities so that they can join together as a larger whole to competently take on some greater outside threat, like hunting a mastodon or defeating another baseball team.
Everybody Wants Some!! looks like just a movie about young men hanging out.
I think there’s more to it.
Sure, like many Linklater films, it meanders, being character-focused rather than plot-driven, and there’s a nostalgic, dreamy-like quality to the movie where there’s no villain, no clear problem to solve, and the worst thing that happens is that a character gets kicked off the team for lying about his age.
Everybody Wants Some!! is not for everyone.
But I’ve watched it multiple times, and after each viewing I gain new insights, whether it’s about how to quickly get into a story, develop characters, or reveal a group of people for who they truly are and what matters to them.
Like a group of old friends, I will return to Everybody Wants Some!! again and again.
I think there are many more lessons yet to be drawn from this movie.