Girls just want to have fun, yet this feels like work

THERE'S ALWAYS SOME WAY TO reinvigorate an old genre, and anybody with the energy and imagination to do so should try.

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

In Emma Seligman's Bottoms, gay misfits and best friends PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) face their last year of high school with a typical teenage longing: they desperately want to lose their virginity before graduation. They're gawky, socially inept. The objects of their affections, unfortunately, are cheerleaders who want nothing to do with them, lanky, blasé Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and sweet, adorable Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), who's under the thumb of the school's bullying, numbnuts football star Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine).