Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg made Cameron Diaz a Bad Teacher in 2011. 8 years later, they turned their deviancy onto the children she taught, with a little help from the Superbad crew. Good Boys takes the high school formula, dumbs it down a little and makes it for Junior High students, capturing those years where, as Britney Spears puts it, you’re not a girl…not yet a woman.
Or in this case, when 3 boys are not quite men. The Bean Bag Boys that is. Though there’s no leader, Max (Jacob Tremblay) is clearly the most mature, successfully working his way into cool kid Soren’s (Izaac Wang) kissing party. Max convinces Soren to invite his best friends, Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon) to the party as well. Unaware how to kiss, the boys use Max’s father’s drone to spy on next door neighbors Hannah (Molly Gordon) and Lily (Midori Francis). This plan immediately backfires, leading to the boys on a series of escapades so they don’t get grounded and go to the kissing party.
Junior high movies are usually afraid to take any risks, and talk down to the tweens. The rare exceptions, like Stand By Me, Bridge to Terabithia, or last year’s best film, have longer legs because they remember that even though they’re small and not quite adults, there’s complicated stuff going on in those brains of theirs. The only tricky part the screenplay has to navigate is how to take the Superbad formula and translate it to 11-12 year olds. Lots of humor is mined from junior high restraints like bikes vs. cars, sexual awakening, etc. High schoolers, despite being awkward, at least know how sex works. When it comes up for the bean bag boys, it’s just a really humorous word salad that’s so foreign to them it’s not even part of the story. However, across the kids in class, no one knows they’re not supposed to know, so they fake it till they make it, with hilarious results. The journey to the mall is obviously very funny, especially how the boys evade the high school girls. At the story’s backbone though is Jacob Tremblay, Keith Williams, and Brady Noon’s chemistry, bouncing off each other with ease. Sometimes they act like kids, sometimes they don’t, but their friendship is real and honest, depicted in a mature way like someone didn’t want to condescend to the audience.
Also not condescending, the pathos running underneath the funny stuff. Something gets said to the boys midway through the film that sits just below the surface. It comes out when the party begins, and gives the story an extra 10 minutes of juice, finding a better ending than the party climax it was building towards. Without spoiling, I’ll say this: Junior high is a time of transition for everyone, but that transition is also personal in its scope and speed. Good Boys lacks the studio backing to risk something really complex at the ending, choosing something funny instead, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make some solid points before the credits roll.
Good Boys made me reflect on my own experiences. Junior high was this really weird time, where my guy friends started to like girls, and vice versa, while I was more like Lucas, wanting to play video games and Magic: The Gathering, confused about what everyone was doing. Good Boys will make you all reflect on where you were in the social hierarchy at that time, and how you learned if a girl liked you, what “French kissing” meant, and when you searched for “porb” instead of “porn” on your computer because of a missspelling.