If her weekend show trying to hold Sunday’s Golden Globe landed with a thud, Amy Poehler has reason to celebrate success in another arena with her latest adventure in the Netflix director chair. Accompanying the sympathetic Wine Country, she decided to venture into the turbulent waters of a high school comedy, something her co-host of Globes SNL compatriot Tina Fey did so well, albeit more broadly, in Mean Girls, both in cinema and on Broadway. Moxie it is less in your face, and based on credible and somewhat fragmented young people resisting the social landmines of just trying to get to graduation and then get out of there.
This is the case of Vivian (Hadley Robinson), 16, a shy student with dreams of going to college and trying to avoid the unpleasant class system of her school, crouching with the same discretion BFF Claudia (Lauren Tsai). But with an annual list generated by cool kids that threatens to mark them with embarrassing attributes, Vivian is losing his mind, driven to action after football star and popular student Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger) defends misogyny when the new student in the class, a girl named Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Pena), dares to suggest The big Gatsby it is full of outdated ideas.
Inspired to discover her mother Lisa’s (Poehler) activist past as a riot grrrl, Vivian creates a disguised zine, Moxie !, remaining anonymous as her editor, but putting Mitchell and others like her in a bad situation, while awakening the seeds of revolution among other girls who start to unite while the zine takes off. It’s not all HS fun and games and sometimes it reaches dark places, such as the subsequent disclosure of a student’s rape and other pressing concerns. Meanwhile, Vivian gets a very nice and enlightened boyfriend, Seth (Nico Hiraga), who is doing well until a dinner with her mother and her own boyfriend (Clark Gregg) becomes dramatic when Vivian loses their relationship, the pressure of her HS’s secret project taking its toll, obviously.
With the strident Bikini Kill song, a sharp and socially bold attitude, as well as an attempt to portray these children as genuine human beings of one kind or another, Poehler’s film and its screenplay by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer (based on the novel YA Jennifer Mathieu) navigates this world beautifully, without ever resorting to stereotypes and making its protagonists totally three-dimensional.
Robinson is a real find, always believable like Vivian and someone you want to root for. Tsai and Pascual-Pena are engaging in their roles, as is the nice guy from Seth from Hiraga. Poehler does well in his most limited supporting role as a mother, but most importantly, he makes his cast shine as a director here. Among them, Schwarzenegger surprisingly belies his 27 years to make a convincing 17-year-old, while Sabrina Haskett, Anjelika Washington and Josephine Langford also have good times as fellow students. Ike Barinholtz fails to add much dimension to his original portrait of a struggling teacher, and Marcia Gay Harden is basically asked to remain unaware of what is going on at this principal’s school most of the time. In general, however, it is a very sweet and satisfying thing in a genre in which it is difficult to find new paths. Somehow Moxie does, and in a memorable way. Good job, Poehler.
The producers are Kim Lessing, Morgan Sackett and Poehler. It starts streaming on Netflix, increasingly the favorite place for the genre, on Wednesday.
Check out my video review above with scenes from the movie. Do you plan to see Moxie? Let us know what you I think.