Conflict: Everybody Wants Some!!

Richard Linklater has probably never read Save The Cat.

That's the most popular of the many books out there on how to structure a conventional Hollywood screenplay. After perusing enough of them to realize there are only so many ways to say "call to adventure," I decided their wisdom can be distilled to a single principle: conflict, escalation, resolution.

Linklater isn't interested in that in Everybody Wants Some, a movie in which almost any of the scenes could be cut. Plot? Conflict? They're nowhere to be found while we follow a gang of college baseball players in the few days leading up to their first semester. Sure there's a baseball season on the horizon, and a love interest for our protagonist Jake, but those typical sources of drama don't kick in until two-thirds of the way through. This is more about spending time with the characters as they muse about life over bong rips and analyze the nature of competition during a game of knuckles. And chase tail.

Unconventional storytelling won't surprise anyone familiar with the slate of independent films that have made Linklater famous, and Everybody Wants Some feels a lot like a companion piece to his cult hit Dazed and Confused. As a storyteller, Linklater's disinterest in conflict is no plainer than in his choice of characters: good-looking, smart (too smart? At one point our lead Jake lectures his lady friend on the plight of Sisyphus), life-is-easy college athletes -- the guys who do get the girls. The few outsiders on the team who might have actual struggles are just that -- outsiders. Rather than manufacturing conflict, Linklater's goal seems more nuanced -- capturing moments and eliciting moods from real life. Like the sheer marvel and envy at watching a future pro-ballplayer split a live baseball with an axe on a bet. "This is gonna be one of the best days of my life," he says. "Until tomorrow." Or in the last scene, when a celebratory "Welcome to college, motherfuckers," from a buddy kicks off Jake's first nap in his first class -- the perfect emotional button for anyone who remembers college fondly.

Interesting to note that although Linklater definitely enjoys flouting conventional storytelling, he's got at least two stand-out studio comedies under his belt in School of Rock and Bad News Bears. This is a guy who reportedly spent his 20s doing nothing but watching movies, so he understands that the rules of structure exist because they're the most effective way to grab an audience. Ignoring them basically lowers your movie's ceiling from "hit" to "cult." But I've heard Linklater talk about writing his debut movie, Slacker -- a series of vignettes with no protagonist -- with a desire to get around a call to adventure, and even though Everybody Wants Some probably could have been told more conventionally and reached more people, I doubt he cares. Those moods he wants to elicit are all dripping with personal nostalgia, and it's safe to assume Linklater made this movie for himself more than any of us. Hey, he's earned the right.