Everybody Wants Some!!

Jenner (center) on a bros’ night out

“Has anyone ever loved college as much as Richard Linklater?” asked Allison Willmore in BuzzFeed.com. The director’s first comedy in years feels like a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused, his great ode to circa 1976 high school, but the new movie makes life’s next chapter look “addictively” idyllic. The main characters are all players on a 1980 Texas college baseball team—a collection of “unapologetic bros.” But while most of them have little on their minds beyond getting wasted and getting laid, they turn out to be a surprisingly endearing bunch. The movie is “bursting with charismatic young actors,” said Michael Calore in Wired.com. Blake Jenner plays the new kid, a talented freshman pitcher who’s being shown the ropes by Glen Powell’s affable senior, and both performers are magnetic. There’s not much driving the plot beyond the perpetual competitiveness of these dozen lunks. Even so, as egos collide, “we can feel lifelong friendships forming.” Though some scenes meander, the movie “never drags,” and it even manages to touch on some of life’s deep mysteries, said Eric Kohn in IndieWire.com. “Simple and profound in equal doses,” Everybody Wants Some!! is “a poignant doodle” from one of America’s most consistently thoughtful filmmakers.

Bright Star

A “fresh breeze from the South” is blowing through Broadway, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Bright Star, a “gentle-spirited” bluegrass musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, “moves with an easygoing grace where others prance and strut.” Set in North Carolina in the 1920s and 1940s, the tale focuses on Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), the worldly editor of an Asheville literary journal, and young Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), a World War II vet and aspiring writer Alice takes under her wing. Flashbacks to Alice’s troubled teen years, when a whirlwind romance led to an unwanted pregnancy, suggest that a big revelation will eventually link the two stories. Yes, the show leans toward melodrama. But Cusack makes a “gorgeous Broadway debut” and the show’s “simple but seductive melodies” make it all go down easily.

You could even call it spoon-feeding, said Jesse Green in NYMag.com. Brickell’s libretto “almost always does exactly the opposite of what a story-based musical requires.” Instead of advancing the plot and giving the characters emotional depth, the songs “repeat, in the most clichéd terms, what we already know from the dialogue.” The title number, which follows a scene in which Billy announces his plan to submit his stories to Alice’s journal, has a snappy tune, but the lyric offers only this Hallmark Card sentiment: “Bright star / Keep shining for me / And one day I’ll shine for you.” Most contrived of all is the show’s climax, when a hardly surprising connection between Alice and Billy is revealed, and the tone turns suddenly gothic. Some audience members actually burst out laughing.

“It is, you might say, a red state kind of show,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. But perhaps “good ol’ blue state Broadway,” so prone to jaundiced-eyed deconstructions of love and family, could use a dose of sincerity. Bright Star’s tale of redemption “got under my skin despite some resistance,” and Cusack—who’s recognizably the same woman no matter her character’s age—“is a revelation.” Despite its unevenness, Martin and Brickell’s musical “feels like a significant, distinctive, and artful entry into the Broadway repertory.”

“It can never be said that Don Cheadle hasn’t given everything he has” to this Miles Davis biopic, said Dominick Suzanne- Mayer in ConsequenceOfSound .net. Set in the late ’70s, Miles Ahead focuses on the jazz trumpeter’s darkest period, when he quit music for five years while nursing his grievances and a fierce cocaine habit. Cheadle, who co-wrote and directed the film, “does some of his best work to date,” creating a wrenching portrait of the drug-addled genius that openly acknowledges just how cruel Davis could be to people he loved. Unfortunately, a fictional central narrative “overwhelms the true story,” said Matt Patches in Esquire. Davis teams with a Rolling Stone journalist, played by Ewan McGregor, to stop Columbia Records from releasing a stolen session tape, and that buddy-comedy mission generates “an enjoyable, vapid ride” that’s also a distraction. Davis’ genius is apparent only in flashback scenes that “drift in on a wave of blue notes and cigarette smoke,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. We see the young Davis bend bandmates like Gil Evans and Herbie Hancock to his will while giving them room to find their inner pulse. “It captures what you hear on many of Miles’ records—the sound of great artists alone together.”

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Adam Cohen’s new book shines a stark light on “one of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice in U.S. history,” said Victoria Nourse in Nature. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize Carrie Buck, a poor young white inmate at the state asylum for the so-called feebleminded. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his 8-1 majority opinion, famously wrote off Buck’s rights with this line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Most likely, Buck suffered no mental disabilities, yet that fact didn’t matter to the men deciding her fate. Cohen’s “lively, accessible, often heart-wrenching” account makes clear that they were in the grip of a monstrous idea, and that Carrie Buck was far from the last of their victims. “That’s the trouble with reformers. They are so sure, and so wrong,” said Amity Shlaes in The Wall Street Journal. Holmes and the men who brought the case had bought into the pseudoscience known as eugenics: They believed that criminality and mental disabilities were hereditary, and that society would benefit if people who carried those traits were prevented from reproducing. At least 60,000 other U.S. women were forcibly sterilized in the decades following Buck v. Bell, and Hitler used the Ameri - can example to bolster his case for mass sterilization—and then for genocide.

Carrie Buck’s story proves “deeply, almost physically, infuriating,” said Dana Goldstein in The New Republic. Though she remains a cipher, we learn that she completed five years of schooling before her foster parents forced her to quit, and that they sent her away after she became pregnant at 17 and accused a family member of rape. No heroes emerge—even Buck’s defense lawyer was collaborating with the men who viewed her case as a chance to legalize sterilization nationwide. But while the main players here are the villains, we do get a late glimpse of Buck as a nursing home resident, and she’s no “imbecile.” She enjoys music and crosswords, and lives to read the daily paper.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

As any 10-year-old could tell you, “pitting the biggest household names in superheroism against each other has never made much logical sense,” said A.A. Dowd in AVClub.com. Nonetheless, that’s the premise of the latest attempt to turn DC Comics’ superhero franchise into a box-office blockbuster. Sadly, director Zack Snyder “invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.” Ben Affleck as a brooding Batman and Henry Cavill as a dour, emotionally remote Superman certainly have the looks for their parts, yet come off as “epic bores.” Whereas director Christopher Nolan raised the allegorical stakes for this genre with his Dark Knight series, Snyder mostly dumbs it down, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. He throws in some ham-handed talk about Good and Evil, but this blatantly commercial film has little to offer but some CGI fight scenes and shots of the heroes shirtless. Still, the visual detail in every frame is sometimes breathtaking, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Jesse Eisenberg’s bizarre, jittery Lex Luthor also provides a bit of fun “in a movie otherwise devoted to po-faced, comicsgeeks earnestness.”

Best books chosen by Helen Macdonald

British naturalist Helen Macdonald is the author of H Is for Hawk, an acclaimed international best-seller that is now available in paperback. Her 2001 poetry collection, Shaler’s Fish, was recently published in the U.S. by Atlantic Monthly Press

Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15). An indelibly powerful exposé of the terrible effects of pesticides, this 1962 book shaped the burgeoning environmental movement. Carson is a phenomenally important writer, and this book is more relevant than ever. We seem to have forgotten the lessons she taught

A Sand County Almanac

by Aldo Leopold (Ballantine, $8). Wise and lyrical meditations from the 1940s on environmental ethics, human and natural history, and the passage of time. Some measure of how fiercely good it is: A well-read, retired U.S. Army colonel once told me that he considered Leopold to be better than Shakespeare.

Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez (Vintage, $17). A wondrous investigation into the Arctic and its place in our imagination, as well as an exploration of landscape, culture, science, hunting, morality, and value. There is a moment in this book when Lopez feels compelled to bow to arctic ground-nesting birds with deep humility and reverence for their tenacity. It always reduces me to tears.

Journals

by R.F. Langley (Shearsman, $18). A selection of journal entries by the English poet R.F. Langley, dealing centrally with what Ruskin called the “prime necessity” of seeing. Langley’s subjects range from moths to etymology, from the philosophy of observation to reading Shakespeare. It is astoundingly brilliant.

The Peregrine

by J.A. Baker (NYRB Classics, $16). A darkly poetic and episodic work about a man obsessively watching wild peregrine falcons in the British countryside. Written at a time when the extinction of the peregrine and nuclear apocalypse both seemed imminent, this is a book about the poetry of death and loss as much as it is about hawks.

The Sibley Guide to Birds

by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, $40). I adore books on how to identify everything from flies to lichens, flowers to whales. This superbly written and illustrated guide to American avifauna, like all field guides, tells us much about birds, but also about us: how we encounter the natural world, our urge to know and collect, our need to carve nature at the joints.

Health scare of the week Americans’ unhealthy habits

To remain healthy, doctors say, you have to eat well, exercise regularly, avoid smoking, and keep body fat in check. But new research shows that only 2.7 percent of Americans are actually adhering to all four healthy habits. Researchers came to that surprisingly glum conclusion after examining national survey data on more than 5,000 people, compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prev ention. Only 47 percent got 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise, only 38 percent had healthy diets, and only 10 percent had proper body-fat levels. Only 16 percent met three of the four criteria. “This is sort of mind boggling, to have so few people maintaining what we would consider a healthy lifestyle,” study author Ellen Smit of Oregon State University tells ScienceDaily.com. “There’s clearly a lot of room for improvement.”