Despite their reputation, most post-Porky’s teen sex comedies ultimately embrace some sweetness in the end.
Actor-turned-first-time-director Jillian Bell is taking that sentiment to a whole new level in her Hulu comedy, Summer of 69. Despite its winking title and the fact that the plot centers on a nerdy high school senior named Abby (Sam Morelos) who hires a stripper named Santa Monica (Saturday Night Live‘s Chloe Fineman) to teach her to seduce her crush, the vibes are much more Pretty in Pink wholesome than bawdy American Pie.
This is a world where the strippers wear high-waisted shorts, the vibrators are just for show, and the most erotic image anyone can think of is Tom Cruise sliding into frame in Risky Business. Despite some raunchy talk, Summer of 69 presents sex and sexuality as more of a thought experiment than a living, breathing part of teenage life. But considering there are plenty of high schoolers who make it to graduation without experimenting with any of the sexual bases, it’s nice to see that experience represented, too.
Though there are still jokes about penises and rim jobs, Bell’s goal seems to be to homage classic 1980s sex comedies while updating the genre with a more sensitive, earnest exploration of female friendship and the weird loner girl experience. (“Live, laugh, c**” is how one character puts it.) Abby is a livestreamer who racks up thousands of views playing violent zombie video games, but IRL she can barely even make a friend, let alone talk to her long-time crush, Max Warren (an endearing Matt Cornett of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series).
Abby is sure she’s the last person at her ritzy Catholic school who hasn’t had any sort of sexual experience yet. So, when she discovers Max has split from his long-time girlfriend, she leaps at the opportunity to bed him, bribing a classmate for locker room gossip that Matt apparently loves to 69.
Since Abby hasn’t even so much as kissed anyone before, she decides to use her livestream money to hire Santa Monica to give her a week-long sexual goddess bootcamp. And since Santa Monica needs $20K to save the strip club she works at from being sold to a creep played by Charlie Day, she somewhat reluctantly agrees to the bargain—setting up her own parallel mid-30s coming-of-age arc in the process.
While it’s easy to imagine a slightly more grounded take on this material digging into the sexual repression of Catholicism or the realities of making a living as a stripper, that’s not this film. Bell instead favors a heightened, cheerful absurdism that keeps things light and breezy.
Nicole Byer, Liza Koshy, and Paula Pell are on hand to deliver goofy riffs as Santa Monica’s dimwitted but goodhearted coworkers. And one of Santa Monica’s first “lessons” in sexual confidence involves driving a car with a blindfold on so that Abby can learn how to give direction in the bedroom. (Not exactly the most relevant parallel, but sure.)
For her part, Abby is prone to flights of fancy that let Bell get hyper-stylized with her filmmaking. The movie opens with a fantastic burst of energy as Abby mentally transforms a cute encounter with Matt into a full-on retro movie musical wedding. There’s also a hilarious marching band credits sequence built around the number “69.” Unfortunately, it feels like Bell burns through much of her budget in the opening act and has to rely on a smaller, cheaper hang-out comedy vibe after that.
It’s the zany charm of Fineman and especially Morelos that keeps things clipping along. Morelos does a fantastic job charting Abby’s slow-growing confidence without losing her endearing naivete. Fineman, meanwhile, effectively pulls from the Anna Faris playbook in her first leading role. Abby and Santa Monica’s burgeoning friendship quickly becomes the heart of the film, even if Bell and co-writers Liz Nico and Jules Byrne don’t do much to interrogate the thornier side of a 30-something befriending a teenager over thousands of dollars.
Indeed, Summer of 69 offers a sweet coming-of-age story about not rushing through life, but not too much in the way of true innovation or depth. Though it’s consistently watchable, it’s a film of light characterization, light plotting, and light chuckles. In that way, it feels like the kid sister of other recent raunchy teen girl comedies like Booksmart, Blockers, Bottoms, and Hulu’s Plan B, whose actor-turned-director Natalie Morales also pops up as Santa Monica’s old high school classmate here.
Still, even if it sometimes stumbles in its slightly overlong runtime, Summer of 69 ultimately sends you out on a well-earned high note. When it comes to sex comedies, it’s hard to ask for much more than a good climax.
