Cheerleading, brawls and sex: ‘BOTTOMS’ lampoons teen comedies, pulls no punches

Preston Barta // Features Editor

Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott’s follow-up to their acclaimed 2020 comedic pressure cooker, Shiva Baby, imagines a wonderfully outrageous world. In their queer spoof Bottoms, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival in March, jocks are insecure drama queens who parade through high school all day in their shoulder pads and uniforms while the teen girls who aren’t cheerleaders start a fight club to remedy the lack of female solidarity. 

What a premise, I know, and it pulls no punches while wailing into the teen comedies of the ‘90s and 2000s. Bottoms pays homage and deconstructs the days when girls’ beauty was merely hidden behind a pair of spectacles while the broest bros who ever broed made bets, surprisingly fell in love and attempted to cover their schematic tracks. Insert Jessica Riddle’s “Even Angels Fall” or Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” to fill the sonicscape with sad-Ken energy and a pinch of optimism. That’s the formula. But hey, it’s all good fun.

In Seligman’s film, the script is flipped, prodded and detonated to fashion a whole new animal of delicious high jinks. It stars Bodies Bodies Bodies’ Sennott and The Bear series’ Ayo Edebiri as two openly gay friends, PJ and Josie, who are looking for a way to shed their virginity before college. To gain social clout and hook up with their school’s cheerleaders, the duo start a self-defense group. Their bizarre plan works! But soon, PJ and Josie find themselves over their heads and in need of a route out before their scheme is exposed.

Bottoms is in no way based in a reality we know. Legs are snapped in two and blood is splattered across the screen, and you see many consequences for those actions. This film exists to go over the top and push buttons, and it’s all the more fun because of it. The one-liners and sucker-punching activities are memorable. So, soak up its cheekiness and wit.

Q&A

At the film’s SXSW world premiere on Mar. 11 (ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike), Fresh Fiction spoke with Bottoms filmmakers and talent on the red carpet. Director Emma Seligman, co-writer/actor Rachel Sennott, and other stars Virginia Tucker (The Last Champion), Havana Rose Liu (No Exit) and Miles Fowler (Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty) share insights about “casualizing the chaos” and the collaborative process.