‘Booksmart’ Gets That High School Girls Make Each Other Laugh, Too

Attention anyone who enjoys laughter and happiness: Booksmart is now available to purchase on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you prefer to get your legally-procured digital content. If you missed this comedy starring Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever in theaters earlier this summer, I must insist you drop what you are doing and watch it immediately—especially if you, like me, have been waiting your whole life for a teen comedy that lets teen girls be funny for their friends in the same way that boys always get to be.

For those out of the loop, here’s the gist of this modern-day high school comedy from first-time director and Hollywood A-lister Olivia Wilde: Feldstein and Dever star as two smart, by-the-book A-high school seniors named Molly and Amy. Molly (Feldstein) is a headstrong control freak who, when she realizes that all the students who partied still got into great colleges, is determined to experience one high school party on the night before graduation. Her best friend Amy (Dever) would rather stay home, but reluctantly follows Molly to party after party out of loyalty, and is especially supportive after she discovers Molly has a crush on one of the popular guys at their school, Nick (Mason Gooding). Amy, meanwhile, is openly gay and has a crush on a girl named Ryan (Victoria Ruesga). But the real emotional heart of the film is Molly and Amy’s friendship: They’re best friends who must learn how to live without each other as they enter the next phase of their lives.

If that sounds familiar, yes, Booksmart shares a lot of similarities with Superbad, the 2007 comedy from director Judd Apatow and writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg that starred Michael Cera and Jonah Hill as two teen boys who also learn about the power of friendship over the course of one crazy night. (The fact that Feldstein is Hill’s sister in real life adds an extra layer of synchronicity.) But what sets Booksmart apart—and what made me fall in love with it from the moment I saw the trailer—is its understanding of a basic fact that so many teen comedies fail to grasp: Teen girls like to make each other laugh.

Not only that, but teen girls are… Wait for it… Funny! Teen girls are, in fact, hilarious. And they spend a lot of their time and energy trying to make each other laugh; one look at the many comedy masterpieces they are uploading to Tik Tok every day proves it. But films like Superbad—which, for the record, is one of my favorite movies—seem to think that’s a trait exclusive to teenage boys. Of the two high school girls in Superbad, one is a perfectly nice and perfectly personality-ness girl named Becca (Martha MacIsaac), and the other is a gorgeous “cool girl” named Jules, played by Emma Stone in her feature film debut. Jules is, admittedly, funny, but only in that makes-crude-sex-jokes-like-a-dude way that guys fantasize about.

Three years later, Stone got to do a better, more nuanced version of that character in her own teen movie, Easy A, which was written by Bert V. Royal and directed by Will Gluck. Other than Booksmart, Easy A is the best example I can think of a modern teen comedy that let a girl be really, truly funny. But crucially, Olive, Stone’s character in the film, is a loner. She’s making jokes for the audience, for herself, for her family, and eventually, for her love interest played by Penn Badgley. Her best friend Rhiannon (played by Aly Michalka) is hardly in the film, and doesn’t seem to be the person Olive wants to impress.

It took only until the second scene in Booksmart—written by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman—for me to know this movie was going to be the one to finally get it right. Amy arrives at Molly’s house in her beat-up Volvo, ready to drive them to their last day of school. Before she gets in the car, Molly breaks out into a silly dance. Rather than shake her head in disgust or make a disparaging comment—you know, that kind of dialogue that would establish Molly as the “weird, funny one” and Amy as “the normal one”—Amy hops out of the car to join her friend. They dance for no other reason than their own amusement, and that sets up the tone of the entire film.

Molly and Amy joke about politics, about their overeager classmate, about their pathetic principal—everything—and it’s all for the other’s benefit. It’s not that one of them is “the funny one;” they’re both funny because funny teen girls are not an anomaly, and they’re funny for each other’s sakes, because a girl’s best audience is her best friend.

Booksmart is now available on Video on Demand for $14.99, and the DVD—which will include a director’s commentary from Wilde, deleted scenes, and featurettes—will go on sale on September 3. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Where to stream Booksmart