Booksmart (2019)

Olivia Wilde's feature directing debut concerns two graduating seniors, Molly and Amy, who discover on the eve of commencement that their classmates partied through high school and still got into good colleges. The premise is sturdy, the pacing is brisk, and the two leads share a chemistry that carries the film through its shaggier detours. It is, by any reasonable measure, a well-made comedy.

The ensemble is where the film's cultural instincts show. Feldstein and Dever are joined by a genuinely multiracial supporting cast, and Amy's lesbian identity drives her entire arc, from her pursuit of Ryan to the awkward encounter with Hope in a bathroom. The film treats this as ordinary fact, which is the correct approach and also the fashionable one. Race, meanwhile, is present without being a subject. The film puts Black, Asian-American, and queer performers on screen and then says nothing about them. That silence reads as confidence in some scenes and as avoidance in others. We are not asked to think about it, so we do not.

Elsewhere the instruction is gentler. The script nudges at the labels we pin on people, most notably in the late conversation with Triple A about her reputation, and it declines to judge anyone by their sexual history. The wealthy Jared and his yacht receive a mild ribbing, though nobody proposes dismantling anything. There is no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent arc, no rewriting of the historical record. Left over is a message about not stereotyping your classmates, delivered through jokes and character work instead of a monologue. That restraint is the film's best quality. So many of its peers shout. This one just gets the girls to graduation and then to pancakes.