Our series on stoner movies you can stream right now highlights an underrated teen movie throwback hidden on Netflix
Buried on Netflix under years of lesser high school movies and sequels to The Kissing Booth is Olivia Milch’s Dude (2018), a crystal among the mids. Lucy Hale, Kathryn Prescott, Alexandra Shipp, and Awkwafina lead the film as a gang of girlfriends going through their last two weeks of senior year, so as far as the setting goes, it’s standard teen movie stuff. But then Dude grinds against John Hughes-style high school-movie cliches at every turn—including by having all four leads unapologetically ripping joints and blunt-riding the entire running time. We haven’t seen a cast lighting up like this in a teen movie since Dazed and Confused (1993), and before that, since the 70s..
To my blazed eyes, Dude upends expectations throughout, and not just by functioning as a high school movie and a stoner movie at the same time. Milch’s script also spurns romantic storylines to depict the four leads always chasing individual wants and needs instead. That creates a loose episodic vibe, and a wholly unpredictable rhythm: at one point there’s a satirical scene making fun of new-age school therapy programs, followed by a dramatic segment where Chloe (Prescott) speaks to a friend about her late brother, followed by a comic daydream sequence where Rebecca (Awkwafina) masturbates in the school bathroom while having a library-themed fantasy, followed by a sharply observed dialogue exchange where all four girls prep for a party while discussing topics including sexting etiquette and the submissive qualities of “younger boys”—and every single one of those scenes happens across the span of the same ten minutes.
So getting back to the 70s thing, if Dude reminds me of anything, it’s not John Hughes movies, or really any other high school movies, but actually the long cycle of women-led movies that were produced by Roger Corman for drive-in theaters, with titles like The Student Nurses (1970), or The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), or Summer School Teachers (1974)—all of which also followed groups of women through episodic narratives that veered through sex and drugs, wants and needs, and comedy and drama, while simultaneously cruising by on affection for the characters rather than more regular narrative momentum. Which now that I write it out, does read like the correct route for a stoner movie to follow. Dude is their worthy heir.
Dude is streaming on Netflix.
