Baseball Movie Review: Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

There is nothing quite like the hangout movie. Plot? No, not here. Characterization? For sure. Vibes? Absolutely. If you're lucky, you'll get the occasional needle-drop and some striking visuals folded in, too. Rather than leaning on the progression of a story to drive viewer interest, the hangout movie is all about stopping the story to merely exist within a space. And few filmmakers excel at the hangout movie in the way that Richard Linklater does.

It's not about driving the story through a character's actions or creating a compelling world. We're not advancing a story or, in most cases, watching someone's growth unfold. Instead, he largely presents you with a particular space & time, along with the individuals who comprise it. It might be Austin, Texas proper, or an anonymous high school thereabout. Or Vienna. Or Paris. It's always somewhere real; even if you've never been there, you feel like you have.

With that space established, it becomes about the people and the words exchanged therein. Linklater did it in his debut film, Slacker. He did it in the cult classic Dazed and Confused. He certainly did it in the incomparable Before Trilogy. Deep thoughts with people you feel like you've known your whole life. Known for bringing in an incomplete script, Linklater collaborates with his actors to drive characterization and dialogue rather than putting them in a box. The result is something spectacular on the chemistry front while presenting as something very real.

That is perhaps what makes Richard Linklater the filmmaker who speaks to me above all others. The simultaneous liberation and cynicism that his band of characters in Dazed and Confused are navigating at the outset of that specific summer rings as relatable for any generation. The conversation and connection that Jesse & Celine experience over the 18 years spanning Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight are the kind of attachment the average person yearns for at one stage of their life or another. Linklater sets you up, and even if the situation or setting itself isn't familiar, the feeling is.

His 2016 baseball raunch-fest, Everybody Wants Some!! is able to bring that energy to an entirely different space. 

Everybody Wants Some!! is barely a baseball movie. The actual film itself includes just a few minutes of actual baseball being played. The film is set inside that world, though. The story itself might not even ring as terribly relatable. But just like Dazed and Confused was able to capture the spirit of a young generation in the combination of character and soundtrack, so too did he do so with Everybody Wants Some!!.

There's a clear link between the previous work of the auteur and the atmosphere of his baseball hangout, even if it stands more singular in terms of both notoriety and clarity in its purpose. And while we've already established Richard Linklater's films as those that exist sans plot, let's walk through how things unfold at a Texas college in 1980.

The Early Innings

Freshman pitcher Jake Bradford moves into the former fraternity house that now serves as the living space for the school's baseball team. He meets McReynolds, the team superstar whose distaste for lefties is exceeded only by his disdain for pitchers, and a smattering of the rest of the ensemble, including Kenny Roper, his roommate Billy Autrey (referred to as "Beuter" by his teammates), second baseman Dale Douglas, Finn, and a pair of fellow freshmen. 

A handful of the team, including Jake, Roper, Dale, and Finn, spend the afternoon driving around the area to meet girls. Their only "success" seems to be found by Jake, whose quiet nature catches the attention of performing arts major Beverly. That night, their head coach introduced the freshmen and the addition of two transfer pitchers, Jay Niles & Charlie Willoughby. Coach sets the ground rules for the house, comprised of exactly two items: no alcohol in the house and no girls in the upstairs portion of the house. Both rules are immediately shattered as the team hosts a party that evening upon returning from the disco. 

Beuter heads home the next day, fearing his girlfriend is pregnant, while the rest of the group wanders the campus ahead of the start of school. Jake spends that day smoking weed with Willoughby as the overly competitive McReynolds is challenged by Nesbit to split a tossed baseball with an axe (at which McReynolds succeeds twice). 

The Middle Innings

In the middle third of the movie, we're back at the disco with most of the group. The hyper-intense Niles argues with the bartender over the length of time it takes to make his screwdriver, snapping when the latter purposefully puts a lime in his drink. They're all thrown out of the disco before ending up at a country bar and line dancing. The vibes are still up, despite Niles' efforts to drag them down. 

After Jake beats McReynolds in ping pong (much to the chagrin of the latter's shattered paddle), he's back smoking with Willoughby, Dale, and fellow freshman Plummer. Willoughby philosophizes about corporate America, telepathy, and "tuning in." Later, Jake, Finn, and others encounter a former high school teammate of Jake's, who has left baseball behind to move into the world of punk. They attend a punk concert that night. Jake leaves a note with his number on Beverly's door, and the two agree to meet and spend much of that afternoon together, presenting a delightful contrast between her performing-arts background and his baseball career. 

Before the third "act" reaches its end, we finally get baseball. At the team's first unofficial scrimmage, we get a montage of position players in the field and pitchers getting their conditioning in before they settle in for bullpens. Niles pumps as hard as he can in his first live session, drawing the ire of McReynolds. McReynolds homers off him on the first swing, offering to sign it before the two have it out. In the midst of all of this, Willoughby is dismissed from practice upon coaches finding out he's 30 and has been floating around to various colleges to keep playing. Jake gets his first mound session, wherein McReynolds gets him with a double in the gap and "welcomes" him to college ball.

Our middle third concludes with the freshmen duct-taped to the outfield wall while the rest of the team takes batting practice.

The Final Out

We've got one last party in us in the third act. Beverly invites Jake to a costume party suited to the performing-arts crowd, while Jake withholds the details from his teammates. Finn and the group, however, get it out of him and attend. Jake and Beverly spend the evening connecting before departing on the first day of class. Jake & Plummer arrive at their first class, history, where each falls asleep, and The Cars' "Good Times Roll" hits as the credits drop.

Run Time: 1 hour, 57 minutes
iMDB Score: 6.9/10
Letterboxd Score: 3.7/5

What Makes It Special

Everybody Wants Some!! lives as a sort of paradox in my mind. Other than existing within the realm of the sport, there's very little that I relate to. Weed, hyper competitiveness, and crass attitudes about women aren't really things that exist in my toolbox (a buzzkill in the eyes of some, to be sure). But there's something that makes this one a key component within the world of baseball cinema all the same. 

The first is how effectively it captures the vibe. I didn't play college baseball. I have, however, coached at the varsity and collegiate ranks. For better and worse, this gets team dynamics completely correct. There's a kinship among some and an adversarial dynamic for others on the same roster. The ensemble spent time on Linklater's ranch working through the script ahead of filming, which fed into the layered chemistry that's fully on display.

There's also a purely lifestyle component within this (and it's the biggest area of overlap with Linklater's other work). It's not quite an idea of self-discovery but rather one of self-examination. The groups of players interchange as the film carries on, with Jake as really the only constant. He's not a protagonist, mind you, but more of a vessel to take us through this world. And as the personnel changes between groups throughout the film, the types of people they interact with do too. They're at a disco, a country bar, a punk concert, a performing arts party, and back in school. That's a uniquely collegiate experience, whether you're an athlete or not. 

More importantly, the film also takes the time to intentionally speak to the spirit of the game. McReynolds is the star, but he has ambition. We see it in the way that he interacts with his teammates and his coaches. We see it when he's not even playing baseball. The positive and negative of that kind of grind are both present. And then we have someone like Willoughby, who keeps trying to circumvent his eligibility rules at age 30. As someone who's spent the majority of my life on baseball fields in some capacity, there's a quote from Moneyball that resonates: 

"We're all told at some point in time that we can no longer play the children's game, we just don't know when that's gonna be. Some of us are told at eighteen, some of us are told at forty, but we're all told." Nobody knows that better than Charlie Willoughby. 

So it's all about the spirit here. The logistics of getting there are imperfect, but we're not always supposed to like characters to find meaning in them. Linklater nails it on multiple levels.

Player of the Game

In an ensemble cast made up of characters that don't grow (not a criticism but a natural, structural outcome), there isn't any one star. There's too much interchange of the group dynamics for that. Instead, the star is the actual baseball. In a movie that has so little of it, Linklater compensated extremely well by including actors who actually had a history in the sport. 

Tyler Hoechlin (McReynolds) played collegiately at Arizona State & UC Irvine (Glen Powell noted in the oral history: "This movie is basically designed to make Tyler Hoechlin look pretty damn cool."). Juston Street (Niles) pitched at Texas and into the professional ranks. Ryan Guzman (Roper) played in college, as well. The rest were required to submit audition tapes that showcased their chops on the baseball field. At worst, they had an athletic background in other sports that they were able to translate effectively onto the baseball field. The result is some of the purest actual baseball you've seen in a movie. In a movie rampant with visual realism, that was perhaps Linklater's most impressive achievement of all.