American Animals: Savvy indictment of youthful privilege

American Animals (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug use and brief crude content
By Derrick Bang

Real life isn’t merely stranger than fiction; sometimes it’s a lot dumber.

In 2004, a quartet of bored Kentucky college students, seeking a way to inject some spice into their plain-vanilla lives, concocted a preposterous scheme to “make millions” by stealing rare books from the Transylvania University library’s essentially unguarded special collections section.

Surrounded by the fluorescent blandness of a supermarket, Spencer (Barry Keoghan, left)
and Warren (Evan Peters) spin a series of what-ifs into an actual criminal plot.

Yes, books. Bulky, heavy books.

Which the lads expected to transform into cash by passing them along to a fence. In Amsterdam.

The mind doth boggle.

The actual events are jaw-dropping enough, but indie writer/director Bart Layton has enhanced the narrative even further: He blends his film’s dramatic depiction of what actually went down, with on-camera commentary and recollections by the now-adult thieves. It’s a cheeky maneuver strongly reminiscent of director Craig Gillespie’s handling of last year’s I, Tonya, with a similar result: We’re fascinated by the saga, yet left to wonder to what degree these narrators are reliable.

Layton audaciously signals his intentions right from the top, with a variation on what has become the usual introductory disclosure statement, when dealing with fact-based events:

This is not based on a true story

And while we mull that over, an off-camera exhalation — the sound of blowing out the candles on a birthday cake — chases away a few words, so the statement becomes:

This is a true story

Don’t know about the rest of you, but I couldn’t help italicizing the second word, as I scanned that line again.

After a brief flash-forward designed to pique our curiosity, we bounce back several months and meet chums Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) and Warren Lipka (Evan Peters). The former is a freshman art major at Transylvania University, the latter blowing off a soccer scholarship at nearby University of Kentucky. When Spencer gets an orientation tour of his library’s $20 million collection of rare books — a glassed-off room supervised solely by librarian Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd) — he’s transfixed by an open copy of John James Audubon’s massive Birds of America, residing in its own display case.

Spencer later describes the book — and its “priceless” value — to Warren. One or both of them imagines taking it, selling it, enjoying their subsequent ill-gotten gains.

Layton intercuts between the actual Spencer and Warren, each remembering their plot’s genesis slightly differently, neither quite willing to admit being the one who actually proposed the theft.

The Edge of Seventeen: Endearing teen-scene traumas

The Edge of Seventeen (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity, vulgarity and some bad teen behavior
By Derrick Bang

Aside from the cool kids — the ones never short of friends and flunkies, and who never seem to embarrass themselves — everybody else, up through high school, inevitably goes through a period of misfit insecurity.

After committing the worst possible blunder, in an era when a single click can expose an
ill-advised comment to the entire world, Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) bares her soul to history
teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson), who'd clearly prefer to enjoy his lunch break in peace.

(In truth, it probably happens to the cool kids, as well. But they never let on.)

In Nadine’s case, it started shortly after birth. By the time she hit second grade, at age 7, she already knew that life — God — had dealt her a rotten hand, and that she’d be a loser her entire life. Taunted by classmates. Plagued by a hopeless clothes sense. Forever in the shadow of an all-too-perfect older brother, the apple of their mother’s eye.

Doomed.

Writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen comes with one of the best tag lines I’ve seen: “You’re only young once ... is it over yet?” It’s an apt description: Craig has an unerring ear for the catastrophes of a disenfranchised high school girl in the modern world, whose outsider status is a quabillion times worse, in this age of social media status.

This film is endearing, embarrassing, poignant and cringe-hilarious: hard to watch for all the ways in which it looks, sounds and — worst of all — feels familiar. We’ve been there. Experienced the end of the world. And, yet, endured. (That which doesn’t kill us...)

The last bit is what worries Nadine, who genuinely fears that her life Never. Will. Change.

Craig’s savvy script fuels the narrative, but the film gets its heart from star Hailee Steinfeld’s adorable, heartbreaking lead performance. Now grown into a high school junior, Nadine is an angst-laden, long-suffering tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions, who manages to be both vulnerable and insufferably self-absorbed. That requires deft acting chops, and Steinfeld delivers.

On the home front, the sibling situation has become worse. Older brother Darian (Blake Jenner), a senior, has matured into a muscled hunk adored by all ... including their mother, Mona (Kyra Sedgwick), who continues to display a streak of favoritism. But it’s clearly a chicken/egg dynamic: Is Nadine massively insecure because of her mother’s bias, or has Mona gravitated toward Darian because his sister is such a handful?

Nadine has survived this long solely because of longtime BFF Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), who became an inseparable companion back in second grade (the two girls bonding over a caterpillar). They do everything together, Krista keenly aware of — and willing to sympathize with — Nadine’s anxiety and lack of confidence.

Everybody Wants Some: College daze

Everybody Wants Some (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for relentless profanity, drug use, sexual candor and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

Boys will be boys ... and it’s a wonder girls will have anything to do with them.

Texas-born writer/director Richard Linklater hearkens back to his cinematic roots with this new laid-back comedy, which he regards as a “spiritual sequel” to his career-making 1993 hit, Dazed and Confused. That film, set in May 1976, followed the antics of small-town high school kids during their final day of class; this one spends three days in September 1980, during the long weekend preceding the first day of college.

Having commandeered a table at the local disco, Jake (Blake Jenner, center) and his new
friends — from left, Finn (Glen Powell), Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), Dale (J. Quinton
Johnson) and Plummer (Temple Baker) — assess the field to determine which young
ladies are worth pursuing.

The goals — getting drunk, stoned and indulging in recreational sex — haven’t changed, nor has the execution: Although Linklater typically begins with carefully dialogued scripts, he encourages his cast members to expand and improvise, as they become more “in tune” with their characters. The result feels spontaneous and organic, like a well-rehearsed play that has grown from humbler origins.

That said, such riffing isn’t always successful. Many of the guys here feel goofily authentic, their conversation and antics what we’d expect from early ’80s college jocks. A few, however, are way over the top, the young actors in question trying much too hard. By the same token, some of the unstructured interactions sorta drift off into space, never really justifying their existence.

At just a few minutes shy of two full hours, Everybody Wants Some also starts to feel a bit tedious, its episodic nature gradually wearing out its welcome. Better that Linklater and editor Sandra Adair had trimmed more judiciously, and left us wanting more.

Even so, it’s hard to resist the film’s larkish charm, and that of its young cast. At its best moments — which is most of the time — Linklater’s unabashedly autobiographical ode to his own college experience is both fun and funny.

The setting is Southeast Texas State University, where incoming freshman Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) has left his small-town roots to become one of the newest members of STU’s baseball team. That allows him the best of all possible perks: a room in one of the school’s two frat-like “baseball houses,” far removed from the cramped, apartment-like dorms in which most new students are shoveled.

Jake quickly finds himself one of the low men in a pecking order dominated by seniors McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) and Roper (Ryan Guzman), who view it as their responsibility to squash the prima donna instincts of newbies who may have been star athletes in high school, but now are no more than scramblers amid peers who all were stars at their respective schools.