Following best friends Amy and Molly on their final 24 hours as High School students, we are first introduced to the usual teen movie cliques - the nerds, the jock, the theatre kids, the popular slutty girl - and it seems like business as usual.
But very quickly we learn all is not as it first appears, and while Amy and Molly begin feeling superior - their hard work in school has paid off, they are off to prestigious universities - they quickly learn that their party hard classmates did just as well as they did.
Molly - a star making performance from Lady Bird's Beanie Feldstein - realises they have missed out on the the High School experience, and set the girls off on a trail to find the Grad Night party, finally trying to let the pairs hair down.
There has been a real renaissance of the great Teen Movie in the last few years. From the aforementioned Lady Bird, to Perks of Being a Wallflower, to The Way Way Back, many filmmakers have tried to capture that unique moment in life all teenagers feel where they feel like everyone else is fitting in while they simply don't fit.
Very few films get it as right as Booksmart.
The performances of the two leads in particular really display the camaraderie the two girls feel, while also showing that as we grow up we can become too stuck in our own minds. Too ready to judge someone or their position and get stuck there. Too stubborn to see things from anyones point of view but our own.
Its not just in the acting that the film shines either, some excellent music choices allow the story to flow, through the hedonism of the rush through the night, into the softer more character driven moments. Wilde clearly has not just an eye for her story but an ear for it.
Its impossible to bring this movie up without talking about its politics either. Amy is an openly gay teen, madly in love with the masculine presenting Nonbinary girl Ryan.
The film never once passes judgment on this in a way a less well handled offering might have. It simply presents it as business as usual. All the same shots you might get if the sexuality was flipped you get here. It just feels like any other teen movie, but dealing with LGBT youth rather than straight. This is how it should be done. Deftly and with a soft touch, and for that its to be applauded.
Though it released here in the UK this week, many cinemas seem to be opening it wider from Friday, so I implore you to search it out. This is a gem of a film, one of the very best I've had the joy to see this year so far, and it deserves to be seen.
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