Some time after PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) have started the fight club – or self-defense club, if you will – that they’re hoping to use to hook up with a couple of hot cheerleaders, it looks like Josie might actually make good on that promise.
While the rest of the club tries their best to vandalize the house of Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) – the star quarterback and in all but name, the King of the girls’ bizarre hometown – Josie takes the opportunity to cozy up to Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), the source of all her romantic yearning who also happens to be Jeff’s ex-girlfriend. When their conversation inevitably turns to Jeff, Isabel thanks Josie for being willing to fight him on her behalf.
“I really value when people use violence and raise their voices for me,” she says – a line that’s clearly meant to be a joke, side-eyeing the idea that women should swoon at the thought of partners who show their affection through screams and punches. But Liu treats the moment seriously, speaking softly without an ounce of cynicism. Josie nods solemnly in response.
This exchange and others like it push “Bottoms,” a teen sex comedy directed by Emma Seligman and written by Seligman and Sennott, to be more than just bitingly funny satire. In a world where young people express their desire for someone with phrases like “step on me,” “Bottoms” takes that idea and literalizes it. The screenplay in particular walks a fine line between parody and reality, lampooning the sex comedies of the 2000s in a way that both pays homage to undersung classics like “Not Another Teen Movie” and attempts to decode the structures that define young women’s relationships to sex and the world around them – all while delivering a campy, outlandish good time.
From the moment we’re introduced to PJ and Josie, the world they inhabit feels like your typical, wholesome, All-American small town – if said small town were distorted through a funhouse mirror. Production designer Nate Jones and costume designer Eunice Jera Lee clearly take inspiration from offbeat teen classics like “Heathers” and “Jawbreaker,” and much like those films, the best flourishes in “Bottoms” take small town Americana and either subvert or exaggerate it. There’s a Creation of Adam-style mural starring Jeff sitting front and center in the cafetera. The school mascot is a dog with a giant penis. And if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that anytime there’s football practice in the background of a scene, those football players are markedly terrible – less “Friday Night Lights,” more the beginning of “Bad News Bears.”
The world of “Bottoms” is heightened to the point that using a bomb on another student’s car doesn’t immediately get you arrested, and Mr. G (played with pitch perfect comedic timing by Marshawn Lynch) can speak freely to his female students about “getting coochie.” But as funny as the moment is where Mr. G berates PJ and Josie for their nefarious reasons for starting the fight club in the first place, Josie’s response – a timid, “I just don’t know if you’re supposed to be talking to us like that” – is what takes the joke from funny to clever.
There’s a brutality to the comedy in “Bottoms” that extends beyond the film’s fight club montages, beyond the broken noses and split lips. It’s layered into the joke when Brittany (Kaia Gerber) contemplates going on a carnival ride so she can easily puke up what she’s just eaten. It’s in the running gag that while it might be okay to be gay now, it’s not okay to be gay, untalented and ugly. It’s in the way that PJ and Josie are so insecure about their own identities, they would rather manipulate a girl’s fear of gender-based violence rather than simply, you know, get to know her – weaponizing other girls’ traumas to heal their own.
All of these jokes land on the backs of stellar performances from the entire cast, especially Sennott and Edebiri’s particular brands of abrasiveness and anxiety. But Seligman and Sennott’s script gets at the fact that a joke is always sharper if there’s an ounce of truth behind it. “Bottoms” has the savage nature necessary to poke at these societal ills while keeping you laughing at the bloody absurdity of it all.