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There’s a scene midway through Never Goin’ Back—Augustine Frizzell’s blissed-out, teen buddy comedy—that features the film’s feisty female leads deciding to make out, right before the camera cuts away, depriving us of a money shot. A more conventional movie about best friends who live (and probably sleep) together, would have probably let the camera linger long enough to see just how far our two highly attractive heroines go. But Never Goin’ Back, opening Aug. 3, is anything but conventional.
For starters, it’s free of many of the tropes that help us identity a teen movie when we see one. There’s no makeover montage in which the awkward AV club girl transforms into a pinup prom queen because, well, there’s no prom. There’s no drug-and-booze-fueled house party while the parents are out of town because, well, there are no parents. Hell, there’s barely even a house. Instead, Frizzell gives us a #nofilter snapshot of what life is like for Jessie and Angela, two broke and reckless besties (played by newcomers Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone) as they drift through Dallas’ barren suburbs, often in a drug-induced haze.
Since premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was snatched up by indie kingmakers A24, the film has frequently been called a female version of Superbad, the hormonal teen romp that helped make “down to fuck” an essential part of the pop culture vernacular. And while Frizzell is admittedly flattered by being compared to this generation’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, she’s also quick to point out that the two films are similar in spirit only.
For one, the boys in Superbad never had to lift a finger. They had a support system, big houses, loving parents and college on the horizon. In Frizzell’s film, which is not-so-loosely based on her own coming of age, the characters struggle to make ends meet. They stave off their suburban ennui by doing large amounts of cocaine in between shifts at the shitty restaurant where they work for minimum wage. Forget higher education. All they want is a weekend at the beach.
But perhaps the biggest way Never Goin’ Back is set apart from Superbad—or any teen movie, for that matter—is the way it handles sex. A different—shall we say, more male—director might have chosen to exploit or objectify Jessie and Angela’s sexual relationship to appease a male audience. Frizzell, however, thought “long and hard” about how to address the nature of their relationship, which was admittedly far more glaring in earlier versions of the script.
“Initially, their sexuality was kind of spelled out much more blatantly,“ Frizzell tells Playboy. “But every time I wrote it into the script, it felt like exposition, like ‘OK, now we have to explain who we are, how we define our relationship, what our sexuality means to the outside world.’ Every time I added something like, ‘OK, now they actually make out,’ it felt like ‘the two hot girls are kissing,’ and I just didn’t want those labels. I thought that was unfair to the girls and that it didn’t have a place in the movie.”
Since Frizzell based the film on her own adolescent misadventures, which included her real-life relationship with her best friend, she was more than well-equipped to explain her characters’ on-screen relationship, which ultimately meant not explaining at all. “As a person who lived that, who had a best friend and had a sexual relationship, it was never defined,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be explained. We never have to explain straight people—we just think, ‘OK, they’re straight people.’ It’s the default.”
“As a person who lived that, who had a best friend and had a sexual relationship, it was never defined. It doesn’t have to be explained.”
Since sex is so integral to the grand tradition of teen comedies—and being a teenager in general—the task of making one without it is as daunting as making a pizza without the dough. But she knew she wanted her movie to be about more than that. “It’s about the friendship, the world as a whole on a broad scale and the things that they’re going through,” she says. “There’s so much about the discomfort of poverty and the discomfort of being from that class level that takes up the space of the film. You have an instant recognition of the boys in Superbad. You can see them, and you understand immediately who they are, so you have room to play from there. In my film, I don’t think most people have that instant recognition, and I think while some people get it, others don’t.”
For a first time director, Frizzell is extremely confident in the choices she made. Part of that comes from the fact that she made Never Goin’ Back once before. It was a torrid 16-day shoot, and when she didn’t like the end result, she scrapped it and decided to make it again. “I wanted to make this the way I wanted to make it, about the people that I wanted to focus on, and it’s a risk because that doesn’t register for everyone,” she says. “Some people are going to hate it, and so you have to go into it knowing and accepting that hey, at least I’m happy with it because at the end of the day, these people that dislike my movie, they can walk away from it, or they can write their review, but I have to live with this shit for the rest of my life.”