The Must See Movie That Introduced Glen Powell - Eight Years Ago

It seems the age of Glen Powell has finally arrived. After gaining notice for a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, a wave of successful films - the box office hit Anyone But You, the critically acclaimed Netflix comedy Hit Man, and most recently, the summer blockbuster Twisters, seemed to arrive all at once, catapulting Powell to A-List status.

Then came an inevitable backlash, and accusations of overexposure, which are arguably justified. Less true though, are claims that Powell “came out of nowhere.” For many of his fans, this moment has been a long time coming.

Specifically, (at least for me), Powell’s stardom has been brewing since the summer of 2016, when he appeared in Everybody Wants Some, directed by his future Hit Man collaborator, Richard Linklater.

Everybody Wants Some was billed in its marketing as a “spiritual sequel” to Linklater’s classic Dazed and Confused. At the time, this felt to me like a desperate move- a director trying to force a connection to an earlier cinematic success. And I think this comparison set audiences up with the wrong expectation - Dazed and Confused was still in heavy rotation among arty indie kids, but Everybody Wants Some was decidedly more macho.

The movie follows Jake (the now-cancelled Blake Jenner), a high-school baseball pitcher about to start his first year of college. The film opens with Jake arriving at his student housing, a giant party house inhabited by his new college-ball teammates. This may seem like the set-up to a raucous sports comedy, but that’s not really how things play out.

Everybody Wants Some is almost aggressively plotless, even more so than Dazed and Confused. The entire film takes place over the three days before college classes even start, and the only baseball we see is a casual inter-team scrimmage. Instead, we follow Jake and his teammates as they hang out, drink, play games, and lust after college girls. It’s a very different vibe than I think even Linklater’s biggest fans were expecting. At times the movie can feel closer to a frat boy comedy like Old School than Boyhood or Before Midnight.

Still, I’d argue (and I’m far from the first person to do so), that Everybody Wants Some is a humane, thoughtful movie that is very much of a piece with Dazed and Confused, living up to the spiritual sequel label I was so eager to dismiss.

First, there are some superficial similarities. For one, in appearance and attitude, Jake bears a resemblance to Randall “Pink” Floyd, one of Dazed and Confused’s main characters. I believe that Pink is the closest thing to a Linklater author insert in Dazed, an athlete trying to keep his spirit and independence in defiance of his coach’s wishes. Jake is a very similar character in this regard- another ball player whose sensitive side attracts derision from his teammates.

Dazed is a high-school film that takes place in the late 70’s, and Everybody is a college film that takes place in the early 80’s. Dazed ends with Pink and his friends driving on the open road, a symbol of their wide-open futures. Everybody opens with Jake on the road, his future about to arrive. The two films are light retellings of Linklater’s real-life coming of age, with Pink and Jake as his avatars.

Even putting aside these biographical connections, the films are a thematic pair. “I'd like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to somethin' else.” outcast Cynthia famously says in Dazed, and that idea is all over Everybody Wants Some. “It’s not the notes that count, “but the space in-between the notes they’re offering you”” Jake’s teammate Willoughby (Wyatt Russell) tells him during a memorable scene. Later, Dale Douglas (J. Quinton Johnson) outlines his “gap method” strategy to beat the Space Invaders arcade game: “Make your space, okay?”

Linklater could have set the movie during a climactic baseball game, or even around a legendary rager thrown by the boys before graduation, like the keg party that provides Dazed with its climax. Instead, Linklater sets the entire movie in the “space between” the notes, in the gaps that Dale is talking about. The movie’s thesis is not that this weekend will set Jake on the path he was destined to follow, or that these three days will change his life and career. The movie’s thesis is that these days were the important part. That when Jake looks back on his life in college, he won’t be looking back on academic or athletic triumph, but instead on the moments between; the loud laughter and quiet moments of connection he shared with his teammates, or the excitement of romance with his new flame Beverly (Zoey Deutch).

As you can probably tell, I love this movie. It resonates with me on a number of other topics I could get into here, but I should probably come back to Glen Powell. Because as much as I love the movie, I wonder if it would occupy the same amount of my mental real estate without him.

EWS boasts a number of strong performances (I’m a particular fan of the turns by Johnson and future Hit Man star Austin Amelio), but for myself and many critics at the time, Powell was the clear standout. As Finn, Powell is the group's philosopher, prone to motormouth theories on everything from feminism to the competitive dynamics of ping pong. Finn is a big brother to Jake and the other freshmen, but his interests are self-serving. The new class become sounding boards for Finn’s musings, an audience for the joy he feels from hearing his own voice. During game time, the team’s leader is McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), but Finn captains them off the field. He directs where they go out, and he’s the architect of their most elaborate pranks and inside jokes.

I like EWS enough that I recently read the screenplay, and doing so led to a shocking discovery: I didn’t like Finn. On the page, Finn was an obnoxious blowhard, one who flips out when his intellectual authority is challenged. On screen, all of that is still true, but Powell makes Finn impossible to dislike. He’s unfailingly funny, but there’s another element to his charisma too - Powell makes sure Finn is in on the joke.

Powell’s take on Finn is that he’s completely aware of how he comes across. To deal with this, he couches some of his most annoying tendencies in a layer of irony. Like Jake, Finn has intellectual leanings that put him at odds with the rest of the team. In order to express them, he turns these qualities into a joke. He completely believes the ridiculous things he’s saying, but he knows that belief is funny. This tactic is true to the Finns I’ve met in my life, traditionally cool and macho guys confident enough to turn their eccentricities into a strength. Powell makes you understand why the team would not only put up with Finn, but grant him significant social power. If you could bottle charisma, you’d put Powell’s face on the label, and I’m sorry to say that if I was in charge of the Oscars, he would have been in contention for best supporting actor.

The industry at large did not respond the same way. I think that’s mainly because EWS just sort of fizzled out. Though it received mainly positive reviews, Everybody Wants Some was criticized for both the main character’s casual sexism and the movie’s lack of prominent female characters. The American election loomed heavily over the summer of 2016, and overdue conversations about toxic masculinity and misogyny were taking center stage. This was the wrong time for a movie about frat guys chasing girls and teabagging each other in locker rooms. The lecherous tone of some scenes (including one where the boys catcall a sorority), was too much for arthouse audiences, and the no-stakes, no-plot structure confused multiplex moviegoers looking for the next Hangover. The film bombed at the box office, and its subject matter made it unlikely to garner any awards season attention.

I’m willing to defend the film on some grounds, and I do believe it attempts to reckon with masculinity and its more toxic elements. For example, the boys refuse to reward the aggressive behavior of one new teammate, Jay Niles (Juston Street), and he’s ostracized until he eventually chills out. That being said, I don’t think the sexism accusations are unfair by any means, and I probably seek to excuse them too easily. This is partially because the movie is a powerful escapist fantasy for me. While Dazed and Confused feels very close to my own high school experience, EWS has become a symbol of a mythical college experience I never had.

All this might be why I latched onto Powell, and his strength at playing Finn’s big brother qualities. In the years between EWS and Top Gun, I tracked his career, and though immediate stardom didn’t come, he was never really struggling. I mean, it’s no tragedy that a handsome, straight white guy took a little too long to get famous, but if Powell remains an A-Lister, as I believe he will, his extended breakout may be looked back on as an interesting quirk of film history. Everybody Wants Some felt like his 48 Hours or Risky Business, an undeniable moment when a new movie star is born. But these things are hard to predict.

In late 2022, just as Powell’s rise was beginning to feel inevitable, I was lucky enough to land an internship at a major film festival. I was posted in a busy industry hub, and I got to watch the cast and crew of a number of buzzed-about films pass by.

At one point, the cast of Devotion, a World-War II air force drama, walked into the room. As they passed me, I saw a familiar face, and I couldn’t help myself:

“Hey, I loved Everybody Wants Some.”

Glen Powell turned to look at me, a little surprised. Before he walked off to join the rest of his party, his mouth curled into about a quarter of his megawatt smile.

“I loved it too. I just wish more people saw it.”