Dallas (Siena Agudong) is a hot cheerleader with dreams of auditioning for CalTech. Drayton (Noah Beck) is a cute star quarterback whose dad is adamant he follow in his footsteps and attend his alma mater with a football scholarship. Surely this very well-matched chalk and chalk couple will never overcome their complete lack of differences and get together? Only time will tell.
A slickly made, nicely shot high-school movie adapted from a Wattpad story with an Instagram-ready cast, the biggest surprise here is James Van Der Beek popping up in a thankless role as the humourless dad. We know from The Rules of Attraction and Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 that Van Der Beek’s tastes are on the edgier side, but don’t tune in if you’re expecting any subversive humour; this is a straightforward and edge-free romance for younger teens. The script is laden with examples of what execs will be hoping is authentic Gen Z argot, though lines such as “I am sick and tired of your main character energy” sound like they’ve been plucked from A Handy Guide to Understanding Your Teen.
Visually the film has a bit more to offer, effortlessly adopting the onscreen grammar of countless high-school movies before it, so we get all the slow-motion corridor walks and flawlessly executed cheer-squad routines we could hope for. It’s all pleasant enough, in a glossy, wallpapery kind of way, but it’s hard to get caught up in a plot with so few surprises and dialogue so relentlessly sincere.
Frank Lloyd Wright famously described television as chewing gum for the eyes, but what’s less discussed is that Henri Peyre, professor of French at Yale University, coined a similar phrase a little earlier in 1944, in relation to cinema: “They dutifully chew their gum to keep from yawning, while absorbing the chewing gum for the eyes of the movies.” This applies here: in the era of streaming, there’s a vast amount of ocular movie gum being pumped out, including this little piece. That’s not even necessarily a bad thing: who doesn’t love a stick of bubblegum every now and then? Still, we cannot live on gum alone – it’s hard not to long for the bonafide hits of the high school genre, which manage to be be both bubblegumesque and have a flavour that lasts.
• Sidelined: The QB and Me is on digital platforms from 17 February.
