Generation Z is not earning itself the greatest reputation: Its members are voting for Trump; idolizing tradwives; and sustaining and expanding the manosphere. So it’s a small relief to know that, at the very least, they’re getting a teen sex comedy as thoughtful and outrageous as Summer of ’69, Jillian Bell’s directorial debut that has a premise as hilarious as American Pie, but from a female perspective that millennial women could only have dreamed of.
Summer of ’69 (which drops on Hulu May 9) stars Abby Flores (Sam Morelos) as a senior at a Catholic high school who’s never kissed a boy and thinks a rim job is someone squeezing your breasts. So when she learns that her decade-long crush, Max (Matt Cornett), is finally single, and allegedly super into 69-ing, she’s intimidated…but inspired. Enter Santa Monica, a local stripper Abby hires to be her sex coach, played by a very convincing Chloe Fineman, who got a sex coach of her own for the film.
“I found this girl in Pasadena, I took one class. She was very easy to pay attention to, so I hung out after and was like, ‘Would you be my stripper coach?’” Fineman told Jezebel during a conversation with Bell, Moreles, and Cornett at the Four Seasons in Austin, following the film’s premiere at SXSW in March. “We just kind of played around, you know, legs open, heart open.”
“Heart open, legs open, it’s the new Friday Night Lights,” Bell adds—it’s a joke, but it actually kind of works. The movie takes place in Syracuse, New York, not Texas, and there’s no state trophy at stake—or whatever Friday Night Lights is about—but Summer of ’69 has as much heart and dedication as all the best sports dramas. Except it’s better, because instead of watching high school boys learn how to identify and/or grapple with an emotion for the first time in their lives, we get to watch not one, but two raunchy, hilarious female leads be weird and messy and rub their eyelids because, as Santa Monica learns from Abby (who heard it from a classmate)—they kind of feel like a penis.
And Santa Monica is a tough coach, but Abby is strategic and determined, almost pathologically so. After visiting the run-down Diamond Dolls strip club, she poses as a guy and calls Santa Monica’s manager (Paula Pell) to request a house call. Abby then offers her $20,000—which she earned from being an accomplished Glitch gamer—to be her sex coach. Santa Monica is reluctant, but eventually gives in after realizing she could use the money to save the Diamond Dolls from being sold to a skeezy guy (Charlie Day), which would turn her into a business owner, which, she decides, is the only way she’ll be able to attend her 10-year high school reunion. (She’s not ashamed of being a stripper—Bell is careful not to turn Santa Monica into a stereotype—she’s just grappling with that typical affliction of not quite being where you thought you would be at 28.)
Training begins when Santa Monica has Abby strut down her suburban street in six-inch stripper heels, yelling out things like, “I am a sex machine!” Watching the scene was so cathartic, I may or may not have browsed Amazon for my own pair of ankle-breaking footwear. I feel strongly that women of any age could learn something from this inspired exercise in shaking up a cul-de-sac while taking up space.
“It feels like we’re in a time where women’s rights are just gone,” Bell said. “So it’s really nice to make something sexual and positive and just feels empowering.” (The moment for the Women’s March has obviously passed but what if we rebranded it as the Sex Machine March…? Just asking questions!)
As with any coming-of-age comedy, Santa Monica ends up learning just as much, if not more, from Abby.
“I think there’s not a lot of movies or examples about female mentorship. It’s a rare thing,” Fineman says. “It’s a double coming-of-age story.”
The premise came from the film’s producers, and Bell worked on the script for a couple of years, noting that she used her relationship with her older sister—“the closest thing I have to a Santa Monica”—as inspiration for Abby and Santa Monica’s dynamic. “She was the one I went to to ask every single scary question when I was younger about who I am as a sexual being,” Bell said. “Just like, ‘Are these thoughts normal?’”
In the film, Santa Monica cites Risky Business as her sexual awakening. At the Four Seasons in Austin, Fineman, Morales, Bell, and Cornett provided a bit more detail about their own “Are these thoughts normal?” moments. For Bell, it was Romeo and Juliet, the 1996 version starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Moreles said hers was Love Actually—but after Fineman revealed she watched Real Sex on HBO with her friends when she was 12, and Cornett says he was so enamored with Hannah Montana that he made a scrapbook of photos of her (his mother still has it in the attic “somewhere”), Morales decided to change her answer to Anchorman 2: “I remember I was like, I don’t know how to feel watching this.”
Behind all the sex jokes (and the sex fun facts; I bet you can’t name the only other creature that 69s—besides humans, of course) is the message that not knowing how to feel, or feeling reluctant, unsure, or terrified, doesn’t mean you’re behind.
“You can feel when you’re younger that you have to rush to get where you feel you need to be, where the rest of your group is—but you don’t,” Bell says. “I actually am just realizing now that I need that same message at 40.”
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