It's a shame "
" is a bit of a drag, because you can see writer/director Maggie Carey trying to pull off something semi-progressive inside her teen sex comedy.
Carey wrote the screenplay based loosely on her own experiences as a teen in Boise. Set in 1993, the low-budget film charts the awkward but scarily organized sexual experimentation of just-graduated high school valedictorian (and virgin) Brandy (
).
Brandy decides she needs to learn about sex during the summer before she heads to college. True to type-A form, she makes a handwritten checklist of sexual acts she barely comprehends -- with the goal of checking off as many as possible before bedding the hot lifeguard (Scott Porter) who works with her at a run-down swimming pool.
Many of her erotic experiments involve her safe-male pal Cameron (Johnny Simmons), who gets emotionally hooked on her even as she's fooling around with Cameron's friends and co-workers and the occasional touring rock musician.
What's unusual is that Carey has crafted a filthy teen sex comedy in which the lead is (a) a strong-minded young woman who (b) doesn't define her entire self-worth through boys while (c) ultimately learning (relatively) nuanced lessons about sex as it relates to emotion -- how it's both "a big deal and not a big deal," as she puts it.
That's all rarer than it ought to be in this comedy genre. And I guess '90s nostalgia is a thing now. Makes for a decent soundtrack, anyway. I just wish the movie was funnier, and a lot less uneven.
Plaza is a great deadpan presence, and properly deployed she can carry a film (see "Safety Not Guaranteed" for proof), but she doesn't find a consistent character here. Good comic actors (Alia Shawkat, Clark Gregg and Bill Hader, Carey's husband) are wasted on gags that are telegraphed or dopey -- a set piece in which Plaza is repeatedly pushed in the pool comes to mind. And undeveloped subplots (Hader learning to swim, an out-of-nowhere rivalry with a nearby country club) pad out the premise.
There's a potentially innovative teen comedy in here somewhere, but it's surrounded by one that's much duller.
(104 min., R, multiple locations) Grade: C
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