Booksmart

The moment Molly, played with a terrifyingly relatable intensity by Beanie Feldstein, realizes that the "losers" and "slackers" she’s spent four years looking down upon are also heading to Ivy League schools is a genuine horror-movie beat. It’s the sound of a carefully constructed worldview shattering in a high school bathroom stall. I felt that realization in my marrow. We’ve all been told that life is a zero-sum game: you can either be the smartest person in the room or the most fun, but you can’t be both. Booksmart doesn't just challenge that binary; it runs it over with a pizza delivery van.

I watched this for the third time last Tuesday while my dog, Buster, spent a solid twenty minutes growling at a suspicious-looking shadow on the wall that turned out to be my own reflection. Somehow, that atmosphere of confused identity and high-stakes absurdity felt like the perfect preamble for a film about two girls trying to figure out who they are when they aren't "the smart ones."

The Chemistry of Codependency

What makes Booksmart work where so many other teen comedies fail is the bone-deep chemistry between Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever. Before filming, they actually lived together for ten weeks, and you can tell. Their dialogue isn't just scripted; it’s a rhythmic, hyper-verbal shorthand. They have "bits" that they don’t explain to the audience—the aggressive compliment battles, the synchronized dancing—that make you feel like an intruder in a very private, very real friendship.

Kaitlyn Dever brings a wonderful, quiet awkwardness to Amy that balances Feldstein’s bulldozing energy. Seeing Amy navigate her crush on a cool skater girl while Molly tries to orchestrate a "legendary" night is a refreshing pivot from the usual "boys chasing girls" trope. This is a story about the romantic intensity of platonic female friendship. It’s basically Superbad for people who actually use their library cards, and honestly, it’s a much more empathetic look at the terror of graduating.

Side-Character Supremacy

While the leads are the heart, the surrounding cast is what turns Booksmart into a modern classic. This film arrived right as the "streaming era" was peaking, and it benefited from that word-of-mouth boom where every character became a meme. Billie Lourd as Gigi is perhaps the greatest comedic "chaos agent" of the last decade. She appears and disappears like a hallucination, jumping off yachts and teleporting into parties with a surrealist energy that keeps the movie from feeling too grounded in reality.

Then there’s Skyler Gisondo as Jared, the rich kid trying desperately to buy friendship. His "murder mystery" party on a yacht is one of the film’s funniest, most cringe-inducing sequences. Olivia Wilde, in her directorial debut, shows a remarkable amount of restraint and style here. She captures the loneliness of a suburban night just as well as she captures the frantic energy of a drug-fueled stop-motion hallucination. She manages to make the film look expensive and cinematic, avoiding the flat, brightly-lit look that plagues so many contemporary comedies.

A New Kind of Cult Classic

Released in 2019, Booksmart had a bit of a rocky theatrical run. It didn't explode at the box office, leading to a lot of "Why aren't you seeing this movie?" discourse on social media. But it found its home on streaming, becoming the definitive graduation movie for a generation that grew up with the pressure of 4.0 GPAs and social media performance. It speaks to the "Burnout Generation" in a way that feels celebratory rather than scolding.

The film's trivia only adds to its charm. For instance, the script was originally written in 2009 and sat on the "Black List" for years before Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman reworked it to fit a more modern, inclusive world. Also, most of Billie Lourd’s dialogue was improvised, which explains why Gigi feels like she’s operating on a different plane of existence than the rest of the cast. Even the teachers—played by Jason Sudeikis, Jessica Williams, and Lisa Kudrow—feel like real people with their own sad, weird lives outside the classroom, which is the ultimate "adult" realization you have at eighteen.

Booksmart is the cinematic equivalent of a panic attack about your future, but with better lighting. It’s a movie that understands that being "smart" doesn't mean you have everything figured out. Sometimes, the smartest thing you can do is admit you’ve missed out on the chaos.

In an era of franchise fatigue and safe, corporate humor, Booksmart feels like a lightning strike. It’s a film that trusts its audience to keep up with the fast-paced banter and trusts its characters to be flawed, arrogant, and ultimately, incredibly sweet. It’s the rare comedy that I find myself quoting months after a rewatch. If you haven't seen it yet, or if you only saw it on a small screen during the pandemic, give it another look—it’s the A+ graduation party we all deserved but probably didn't have the guts to throw.