Bottoms review: A knockout comedy about a queer fight club

Everything is sex, except sex, which is power. So goes the famous quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, and reproduced in Janelle Monáe’s album Dirty Computer. If the main characters from Bottoms, the new comedy from director Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby), have heard of Wilde or Monáe, they’ve internalized the quote’s mirror image. In Bottoms, everything is violent, except violence, which is horny.

High school seniors Josie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennott from Bodies Bodies Bodies) are introduced in Bottoms in classic ’80s sex comedy fashion: scheming about how to convince their female classmates to have sex with them. No one dislikes them because they’re gay, they tell us, but because they’re “gay and untalented.” At a carnival marking the beginning of the school year, they mistakenly give credence to a rumor that they spent the summer in juvie. Combined with the minor maiming of quarterback Jeff (a stand-out Nicholas Galitzine) with their car, they enter senior year tiptoeing toward street cred. With the homecoming game on the horizon, promoted as an unspeakably violent affair, they cook up the idea of a women’s self-defense club.

Of course, since they didn’t actually spend the summer in juvie, they know nothing about self-defense. This is simply a fight club, and it’s an extracurricular activity they joined for the same reason that football players play football: to have sex with cheerleaders. But while football players are clad in armor and engage in relatively bloodless confrontations, the violence of the women is far more visceral—black eyes and mouthfuls of blood. Bottoms is horny but largely sexless—Galitzine is the only one who shows any skin—so the violence is the film’s erotic act.

The atmosphere of the high school is so exaggerated and theatrical it’s reminiscent of Glee. Football players wear their uniforms, cleats included, every day to school, while the flyers advertising the homecoming game depict a ripped, shirtless Jeff. At least twice, students make off-handed comments about needing to buy guns. Pep rallies start with a command to “Get Horny!” A history class reenactment of the Treaty of Versailles turns into a brawl that hardly anyone pays attention to. There are bombings, plural. In an environment like this, the fight club is hardly dissonant; what’s unique about Josie and PJ’s extracurricular is that it appears to be the one place in the school that centers the female students.