The Raunchy Teen Comedy Gets a Queer Twist

In the puberty-addled cinematic universe of the teen sex comedy, no carnal-minded pursuit is too implausible. High schoolers steal alcohol from other people’s houses, lose their parents’ prized possessions, drive across the country, lie about their ages, fall for undercover vampires, and get wildly intimate with baked goods.

Bottoms, the latest entrant in this chaotic canon, puts a queer spin on these odysseys. The filmmaker Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature follows PJ (played by Rachel Sennott, who also co-wrote the screenplay) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), two high-school girls infatuated with hot cheerleaders who barely register their existence. When a rumor spreads that the “untalented gay losers” spent the summer in a juvenile-detention center, they parlay their newfound street cred into forming a fight club. On paper, the new campus organization is dedicated to teaching other girls the self-defense tactics that they used to stay safe—but, like most of the horny knuckleheads in these sorts of films, PJ and Josie are really just hoping to get close to their crushes, and eventually have sex. To put it very mildly, hijinks ensue. Bottoms marries the boisterousness and misanthropy of its teen-comedy predecessors, and is often raucously funny. But its abundance of gestures to those past influences and uneven satirical swings sometimes threaten to overshadow the story’s emotional core.

Seligman’s 2020 debut, Shiva Baby, starred Sennott as a bisexual Jewish 20-something horrified to encounter both her sugar daddy and her ex-girlfriend at the titular mourning ritual. Like that film, Bottoms is an acerbic, self-aware coming-of-age story that contemplates the evolving social expectations placed on young queer women. This cerebral sensibility works in the film’s favor, anchoring the raunch-fest in raw, adolescent angst. Pithy lines such as “Do you wanna be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?!”—an accusation that Josie lobs at PJ during the film’s opening sequence—showcase Seligman and Sennott’s sharp, highly referential humor. Edebiri is particularly delightful as an inhaler-toting skeptic of the fight-club scheme, and the film draws some amusing visual irony by throwing the 27-year-old main actors in a high-school setting without attempting to age them down.

Edebiri’s comedic chemistry with Sennott’s more assertive braggart, honed in part through their prior experience co-leading a Comedy Central series, keeps Bottoms feeling propulsive even when the film takes on more weighty themes or inane subplots than it can meaningfully tackle. Unlike the awkward sapphic horndogs at its core, Bottoms can sometimes seem like it’s afraid of committing to a cohesive identity. On its face, the movie is a tale of friendship, fights, and pheromones, but it packs in a dizzying collage of genre experiments and allusions to other films. Bottoms is, somehow, part sex comedy, part high-school satire, part slasher, part unexpected Marshawn Lynch comedic vehicle. (Though he’s in a handful too many scenes, the former NFL player generally delights as Mr. G, the clueless adviser to the girls’ fight club.) There are bombs, broken noses, bell hooks references, and a big important football game. And without spoiling too much, the campy, violent twist toward the end seems parachuted in from a different film altogether.

Read: More comedies with wild sex scenes, please

Bottoms is filled with nods to contemporary queer youth culture: The score was co-composed by the pop star Charli XCX, a darling of the queer internet, and the girls wear baggy polos, corduroys, and shirts emblazoned with sayings such as SPIRITUAL PLAYBOY. These winking details are among the film’s most endearing fixtures, but they also make some of the movie’s other choices feel especially perplexing. Along with a slew of surprisingly off-target eating-disorder jokes, Bottoms takes a bizarrely blasé tone toward the high rates of sexual assault among teenage girls. In one scene, PJ and Josie request that club members take a break from throwing punches to learn a bit about one another’s motivations for learning self-defense. After being asked if they’ve been raped, most of the girls hesitate to raise their hand—a reluctance that vanishes once it’s clarified that “gray-area stuff counts too.” But the potent moment is undercut by how breezily the film moves on from the girls’ alarming confessions. One character, who’s portrayed as a hyperemotional huffing addict, constantly gets played for laughs even as she attempts to telegraph the deep reserve of pain caused by her stepfather’s severe abuse.

The “gray-area” sequence is meant to be a stiff joke, but it didn’t land for me the way that Seligman told my colleague Shirley Li it has for other viewers. Of course, the whole point of Bottoms is that its protagonists are a pair of teenage dirtbags looking to get laid without caring whom they hurt—just like all of the straight boys before them. But the film is savvy enough to mock how easily some people—girls and women very much included—weaponize the language of solidarity to selfish ends. In its more clear-eyed moments, the film directs trenchant critiques at fair-weather adult allies, while making clear how many of its teen characters are starved for authentic relationships. But given the opportunity to deepen the girls’ connections to one another, Bottoms takes the easy way out by prioritizing borderline-edgelord humor.

Bottoms really shines when it forgoes loyalty to its many pop-culture references, and gives these quieter storylines—like one about Hazel, a long-suffering child of divorce who does the legwork required to keep the club afloat—some room to breathe. That neither of the two leads has anything resembling an overwrought coming-out subplot is refreshing; even more revelatory is the nonchalance with which the film handles another teen girl’s attraction to her fellow fight-club member. There’s no fanfare about her being with a girl after leaving her boyfriend, no agonizing over anything but the specific circumstances of the new connection. For young people entering an uncertain era of their lives, watching that kind of judgment-free fluidity play out on-screen could easily feel as powerful as landing the perfect punch.