‘Bottoms’ Review: Emma Seligman’s Wild Ride of a High School Comedy Is a Gonzo Gay ‘Fight Club’ Meets ‘Heathers’
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Bottoms,” a high-school comedy that is brazenly gonzo, scaldingly and at times even dementedly over-the-top, and actually about something, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) have been best friends since the first grade, but in their senior year at Rock Ridge High they’re at the end of their tether. They’re losers, they’re lonely, they’re lesbians — and in their eyes, that puts them beneath the bottom of the food chain. So they do what anyone in their position might do. They decide to start a fight club! It’s modeled (sort of) on the one in “Fight Club,” though the movie isn’t particularly interested in that film, where the characters staged bare-knuckle brawls out of a kind of self-serious macho romantic doomsday nihilism. In “Bottoms,” PJ and Josie, in the time-honored tradition of teen-movie protagonists out to lose their virginity, are just looking for a way to sleep with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. They build the club around a scurrilous and rather ridiculous lie: that they’ve both spent time in “juvie.” Sitting around in the gym, with a handful of the “normal” girls they’ve roped into joining the club, all of them share stories about the men they’ve had to fend off (stalkers, pervy stepfathers, you name it). And when they get to the fight-club part, letting out their aggression, the jabs are shockingly violent. We laugh, but we also think: What’s going on here?