---

Best friends and outcasts in arms Josie and PJ (played by real-life best friends Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) start Emma Seligman’s Bottoms resolute that their senior year of high school is going to reverse the “ugly and untalented” loner reputations preceding them for good. It’s going to be the year that they woo their respective crushes: Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), the good-hearted girlfriend of the football team’s meathead quarterback (Nicholas Galitzine), and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), Isabel’s loyal wingwoman. 

Such a goal — more enthusiastically chased after by PJ than the more reserved Josie — is, it goes without saying, not going to be very easy to achieve. There’s their high school’s familiarly strict social hierarchy; there’s how most indicators suggest Isabel and Brittany are most likely straight. But it starts to seem much more possible when, in a rash attempt to get themselves out of some early-movie punishment from the principal I won’t get into, PJ lies that she and Josie are planning on starting an after-school self-defense club for the female student body. Josie would prefer this purely stay hypothetical. But PJ coaxes her into seeing it through as means to hook up. Their school’s lack of female camaraderie could potentially be parlayed to entice Isabel and Brittany to join. 

Read the full column at South Sound.