Growing up is more about lateral expansion than forward motion in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, a film that expertly juggles the goofy raunch of college sex comedies and the glowing insight of the director’s best work. Its young hero hasn’t grown or changed much by the end of the movie, but his world is infinitely bigger.

This time Linklater is dealing with the cusp of two eras—Everybody Wants Some!! is set in 1980, and it’s very much concerned with all the pop-culture shifts that year implies—and with the brief stint of time when childhood and adulthood seem to overlap. There’s hardly any of the melancholy or sense of impending loss that infuses many of his films; this is Linklater at his sunniest—loose, fun, and impossible to resist.

The director has described it as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 masterpiece Dazed and Confused, and that’s accurate in ways. But while the characters in the earlier film were facing the end of an era—the end of high school, and of childhood—Everybody Wants Some!! homes in on the beginning of one: a young man’s first weekend at college, where he’s more concerned with sketching out a new place for himself than mourning the loss of whatever golden-boy status he’s left behind.

For the kid, Jake (Blake Jenner), the transition from high school to college is a time of hope and endless possibility. He arrives at a fictional Texas university on a baseball scholarship with a crate full of records in his backseat and “My Sharona” blasting from the stereo of his sleek Oldsmobile 442. Jake is quickly installed in one of two houses reserved for the school’s high-profile baseball team, where his housemates include fast-talking Finnegan (Glen Powell), stoner Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), and high-strung team captain McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin). As a freshman pitcher, Jake faces only the most casual hazing before getting ushered off on a weekend-long quest to cram as much partying as possible into the last weekend of summer vacation. An on-screen timer frequently pops up to count down the hours until classes begin.

A lot happens in the movie, but little of it is of any consequence as far as plot is concerned. Jake and his new pals go to a lot of parties, skimming along the surface of numerous social scenes. They’re up for anything, and whether it’s line dancing at a country dive or wading into the pit at a punk show, they’re embraced wherever they go. They’re intensely tribal in their commitment to one another as buddies and teammates, but they’re also aware, at least instinctually, that part of growing up is reaching beyond the niches that might have once defined them. There’s something coolly aspirational about the way cliques are dismantled and cultural barriers are ignored, even if it’s all in the name of getting snockered, stoned, or laid.

During the film’s opening scenes, you can be forgiven for wondering if you really want to spend two hours with these guys. They’re essentially reproductive organs with feet and porn ’staches—so committed are they to drinking beer and seducing women that you wonder why they even bother zipping their pants in the morning. It would be easy to turn them into punchlines, or to allow their relentless masculinity to assume more troubling shapes. By the time Jake sets his sights on a theater major named Beverly (Zoey Deutch, whose sweet level-headedness recalls the grounding touches that her mom, Lea Thompson, lent to Back to the Future), her relative maturity is almost beatific.

But Everybody Wants Some!! is far too good-natured and humanistic to let us write off its central characters as obnoxious jocks. They are both of those things, but by the time the film reaches its sweet, sleepy finish, we’re sorry to say goodbye to them. It’s not that the guys change over the course of the movie—when things wrap up on the first morning of classes, it’s clear that the weekend’s debauchery was a tone-setter for the coming school year and not any sort of last hurrah. We’ve simply gotten to know them, and in both Linklater’s films and his worldview, everybody is worth getting to know.

April Snellings

April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.