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‘Bottoms’ review: In a queer ‘Fight Club’ with a side of ‘Heathers,’ the jokes and punches fly

Michael Phillips | Chicago Tribune (TNS)

The wide, bright, satiric world of “Bottoms,” director and co-writer Emma Seligman’s second feature, expands and contracts as needed. One minute it’s a sincere portrait of a teen friendship between the equally uncool and marginalized PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri, Hulu’s “The Bear”). They’re queer, witty and a little heartbreaking, and not only because they refer to themselves as “ugly” and “losers” when they’re plainly not.

Then, on a dime, Seligman and co-screenwriter Sennott change the key and start tossing whole chunks of “Fight Club” and “Heathers” into a mini-Ninja blender, along with the entirety of John Hughes’ canon of hetero-male high school ‘80s cool.

The result — peppy, bloody and swift — is very different from Seligman’s 2021 sublimely nerve-wracking debut film, the deft comedy of lesbian Jewish mortification “Shiva Baby.” This one tries more, every which way and largely successfully. Arch? Glib? Yes and yes. But I laughed a lot, all the more so because the payoffs in “Bottoms” have a way of delivering in stealth mode, like a process server working for Jason Sudeikis.

We’re real world-adjacent here. PJ and Josie’s high school is ruled, literally, by the football team, the Vikings, and quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine, lately of “Red, White & Royal Blue”). They harass, bully and float like hormonally unchecked royalty. Unfortunately for Josie, her most ardent crush, cheerleader Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), is philandering Jeff’s girlfriend. But for how long?

An unreliable but exploitable rumor about PJ and Josie’s hard-knock life in juvie leads our heroines to their Big Idea: starting a self-defense club for females, with noble intentions up front but a yen to get close to the gorgeous, popular girls as a bonus. It works; the club becomes a riot of broken noses and bloody gums. And then they take it outside. In the realm of “Bottoms,” jokes about sexual assault, the raging patriarchy and Black Republicans not yet of voting age are equally fair game.

Some comedies, even erratic but rewarding ones like this one, would work with different casting decisions made for the leading roles. “Bottoms,” I’m not sure. That’s another way of saying Sennott and Edebiri work beautifully together and separately. The escalating craziness of the film’s final half-hour, leading to the championship game with the Vikings’ bloodthirsty rivals, could’ve used a little more craziness, a wilder visual quality.

That said, Seligman set out to create a “campy queer high school comedy in the vein of ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ but more for a Gen-Z queer audience,” as she told a festival audience last year. Nothing’s quite as it seems here, even the time frame: Characters rely on generations-old technology (an actual phone book makes an appearance) and, like “Peanuts,” the universe of “Bottoms” is essentially bereft of adults or reliable adult supervision.

PJ and Josie score, however, in lining up one of their instructors (Marshawn Lynch, very funny) to “advise” their thirsty fight club. In the end, all these young women want is a foothold on life, a little less humiliation and some physical intimacy. If that makes “Bottoms” snarky on the outside but conventionally heartfelt on the inside, well, that’s fine, actually.

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‘BOTTOMS’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some violence).

Running time: 1:30

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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