Supercool Parent Guide

High school student Neil (Jake Short) has a mad crush on Summer (Madison Davenport), but he’s not sure she knows that he exists. Running on encouragement from his best friend Gilbert (Miles J. Harvey) and sister Jaclyn (Odessa Adlon), he works up the courage to talk to her at lunch – only to explosively stress-vomit on her. Things aren’t looking good for Neil’s prospects of young love, and he resigns himself to doodling juvenile fantasies of a life he’ll never have. Until, that is, he makes a wish for another chance with Summer. Unbelievably, he gets his wish in the form of a complete transformation: Instead of dorky Neil, he wakes up looking like a model called Ace (Josh Cranston). If he plays his cards right, he might be able to leverage his new-found good looks into an invite to Summer’s birthday party that night…but only if he can get over his anxieties and insecurities.

This isn’t the raunchiest teen sex comedy I’ve seen, but it’s definitely one of the weirdest. I can’t even think of another movie that has a teenager trying to buy off-brand Viagra while holding hands with a drug dealer who is having sex. Don’t even ask me why they think they need the Viagra. I’d prefer not to delve to deeply into the minutiae of the film. (I’m already trying to forget about it.) Apart from the general sexual misbehavior (and near constant graphic conversations about same), there’s a metric ton of profanity in the film – 121 f-bombs in 100 minutes. While unsurprising considering the rest of the content, it doesn’t make the film any more palatable to a family audience.

I will say that the unhinged level of sexual obsession and profanity are not uncommon in the general high school population, so the film scores a few cheap points for accuracy. Those points do come at the cost of an audience, though, so I’m not sure how comforting that’s going to be to the studio. Following in the footsteps of the similarly-titled Superbad, Supercool is a crass look at the seediest underbelly of adolescent angst with a strange sprinkling of violent crime. It’s certainly not aspirational, barely entertaining, and generally just gross – definitely not worth the price of admission.