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In Summer of 69, a comedy that premiered at SXSW in March, poor Bryan Adams doesn’t even get a mention. Rather than coasting on the nostalgia summoned by his 1985 hit, the title is instead a reference to the top-and-tail sex position (Adams has claimed, much to the annoyance of his co-writer, that the song was also referring to the same thing).
It’s the unusual focus of awkward teen gamer Abby (relative newcomer Sam Morelos) who has a long-running obsession with her classmate Max (Disney star Matt Cornett). The best she’s been able to manage throughout their time at school is small talk, but when he breaks up with his longtime girlfriend, she sees an opportunity. Through the grapevine she hears that Max is a fan of the 69 position and Abby, whose experience of kissing has been limited to the back of her hand, seeks assistance. It arrives in the form of Santa Monica (Saturday Night Live’s go-to impressionist Chloe Fineman), a stripper she enlists via the promise of a $20,000 payment. It’s the amount Santa Monica needs to save the strip club after unpaid taxes piled up and if she can come through with it, she’ll become the new owner.
Actor turned writer-director Jillian Bell’s naked, and sometimes literally naked, attempt to craft a new rewatchable comfort food favourite with notes of both sweet and salt is charming when it works but distractingly effortful when it doesn’t. In her script, the story is leading to a high school graduation for Abby, a high school reunion for Santa Monica and an impending strip club closure as we also await the return of Abby’s parents, a precariously loaded shelf of ticking clocks that makes it feel like we’re switching between 24/7 sitcom channels. The manipulated flip-flop between moments of warmth and spice can be similarly jarring and it allows us to see the joins a little too much, her film sometimes more reminiscent of what it’s trying to be than for what it really is.
While Bell struggles to tie this all together, in the sleekly commercial way we want and expect within territory such as this, there’s enough that’s likable in a shaggier way to keep us on side. For an SNL star trying to prove herself in her first major movie co-lead, Fineman is competent if a little miscast, never quite delivering her X-rated one-liners with enough spunk (she’s certainly no Jennifer Lawrence in the similarly pitched yet far funnier No Hard Feelings), but her lesser-known co-star Morelos is the real find. She’s featured in Netflix spin-off The 90s Show before but this is a major star-making turn, for once an actual teenager playing a teenager and bringing all of the palpable unsureness and anxiety that comes with that. If some of the characterisation doesn’t always work (would someone who lives such a very online life really have such unawareness of easy-to-Google sex acts?) she sells every nervous and ultimately empowering moment. The growing spark between the pair is predictably structured (the inevitably dramatic final act fight and the inevitably show-stopping win-her-back act of public speaking) but the dynamic of two people coming to the simple realisation that they just need a friend is effectively warming without becoming sappy.
Bell’s direction is for the most part crisp and impressive (despite landing on Hulu, it looks like a real, well-lit movie) although her showy lurches into surrealism don’t always work (a sex shop haunted house is better as concept than execution). The film’s logic is less intentionally surreal yet frequently baffling, the world Bell creates often not making a whole lot of sense, yet it’s filled with enough earnest charm that we don’t mind spending 100 minutes living in it anyway. Arriving at the start of summer, it’s a brief, sunny escape that you’ll have forgotten about by the time autumn rolls in.
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Summer of 69 is available on Hulu in the US on 9 May with a UK date to be announced
