Oh hell, let’s just be honest. What do I have to lose?
I mean, am I gonna be arrested if I reveal that Just One of the Guys is one of my very favorite movies? Am I gonna be sued if I say that I think it’s one of the funniest teen comedies ever? Am I gonna lose precious credibility as a film reviewer? Is somebody gonna try to kill me because I’ve seen it 957 times?
No, no, I don’t have any credibility anyway, and I hope not.
Nostalgia plays a part in this, sure. I’ll never deny that. This is one of those movies that popped up on cable TV regularly back in the late 80s and even into the 90s and I often found myself plopped in front of it and having a blast.
Watching it again in my crumbling middle-age years though, it’s STILL GOOD. I still love it. It may even make me laugh more than ever. Over the years, I’ve only come to further appreciate how snappy and rapid-fire it is with the gags while its characters still hold up as memorable and charming. I’m ready to go anywhere with them.
I no longer merely watch this movie. When I put it on these days, I’m just hangin’ out. In a California high school in 1985, when skinny ties and the Pat Benatar/Josie Cotton look ruled. There are worse places to be.
The story is pure screwball stuff: A pretty teenage girl named Terry (Joyce Hyser, who should have been a bigger star) has serious aspirations to be a journalist, but thinks that she’s getting overlooked by her teacher merely because she’s female. So, she secretly enrolls in another local school as a boy and submits her articles to their journalism department to test her theory.
This means that she has to put on a whole elaborate act. Cut her hair short, dress up as a boy, act like a boy, walk and talk like a boy, use the boys restroom and locker room, find clever ways to not give herself away in gym class and generally run through a series of clever gender-bender Some Like it Hot gags (except in reverse and more raunchy).
Along the way, in her secret life as a young man, she quietly falls in love with an outcast nerd (Clayton Rohner) whom she gives a makeover and finds that he’s only some hair product and a popped collar away from being a full-on Tiger Beat heart-throb.
She also gets pursued by a cute and very aggressive girl (a young Sherilyn Fenn!) who, it seems, is way into short, androgynous guys, particularly when he “dresses like Elvis Costello and looks like The Karate Kid“.
Meanwhile, poor Terry can’t be honest with any of these people because it would spoil everything that she’s busting her ass to achieve here. Both lovelorn teen drama and wacky hijinks ensue. (Meanwhile, the parents are “on vacation”, always the best method for getting the boring grown-ups out of the picture in a teen movie.)
One thing that helps a lot is that the director is a woman, Lisa Gottlieb. This whole movie treats male identity as mysterious. Not lesser. Not “toxic”. Not the cause of every problem in the world.
Here, it’s just a very foreign thing. And that approach feels genuine.
Though she tries, Terry can never get the hang of insulting banter as a form of male bonding. She can’t pretend to cheer on the lascivious details of her crush’s seedy story about how he lost his virginity. How to behave in the school restroom is a struggle throughout.
There are some cheesecake shots to sell tickets, but this is still a woman’s-point-of-view movie, which is cool with me. Teen sex comedies are about adolescent confusion. Most guys are massively curious about how girls see them. Here’s a film that offers some insight on the matter.
There are all sorts of men in this movie.
There’s a meathead jock who terrorizes the school (William Zabka, playing his second bully in a row after his breakthrough in The Karate Kid) and Terry’s college-age, nice-hair, soap opera villain boyfriend who sees her as a trophy and has no interest in her ambitions or thoughts.
Both are dirtbags, of course.
Meanwhile, there are also sensitive guys, likable pipsqueaks and charming, if unfuckable, weirdos.
Then there’s Terry’s sex-crazed brother (Billy Jacoby, giving the film’s funniest performance) who’s desperate to unload his virginity, but is also a good guy at heart. He talks a big game, but we know that we don’t have anything to worry about with him. He’s too hilarious. Gottlieb loves him.
All of these guys are Terry’s collective influence of what to be and what NOT to be in her charade. Throw in a load of her own feminine intuition and she ends up as an ultra-stylish, yet mysterious, little dandy, all loose ties and bold jackets and sunglasses. Maybe the jocks don’t like him, but he stands out. He’s intriguing and he comes off like a guy who gets laid on the reg.
For film nerd cred, the script sneaks in some cool classic movie references. The high school is called Sturgis-Wilder, a blatant reference to Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, Hollywood’s resident writer-director wits of the Golden Age. Also, the school bully is named Greg Tolan, which any classic movie nerd who’s spent his or her date-less nights wisely knows in their bones is a nod to Gregg Toland, the seminal cinematographer who shot Citizen Kane along with several films directed by William Wyler and a few good ones from John Ford and Howard Hawks.