James Y. Lee
Imagine every trope you’ve ever associated with the high school comedy— these comical exacerbations of the milestones that high schoolers go through over the course of their final school year. Think prom, think the yearly school play, think graduation, and so on. Now, imagine that, rather than the typical batch of maladjusted teenagers on the cusp of their first taste of adulthood as the cast, you instead get to observe maladjusted adults going through these rites of passage and places of social awkwardness. Such is the predicament of the ensemble of Marty Schousboe’s new comedic feature, Never Change!, whose LCD Soundsystem needle-drop early on in the film I should probably have seen coming.
Back in 2008, the senior class of the fictional North Meadows High School never got the chance to experience their last year of high school. Long story short, a tornado absolutely leveled their school building, causing them to simply live out their lives having missed out on Year Four. But an out-of-character landmark piece of pro-education legislation (which includes, of course, higher wages, “yada yada,” and Seinfeld), courtesy of Congress, has forced them back into the halls of their rebuilt high school. They’re now legally required to fill in the tornado-sized hole left in their academic records as 30-year-olds, siloed off into their own class without the presence of actual teenagers.
Don’t think too much about the realistic implications of any part of this. Think instead of recent films like 2023’s Bottoms, which aren’t really interested in the actual dynamics within high school so much as they’re invested in blowing those dynamics up to a farcically super-sized parody of themselves. The spectacle of Never Change!, in keeping with that spirit, is mostly housed in the fact that the archetypes and stereotypes of high schoolers are trapped in the bodies of people twice the age of normal high schoolers. These are people who should almost certainly know better than to engage in an even worse version of the antics that high schoolers engage in. They also don’t seem to especially care.
You have Amelia (Jo Firestone), erstwhile the Valedictorian and class president, stuck in a dead-end marriage. Barstool owner Tedi Mayo (Carmen Christopher) was one of the school’s biggest slackers, and wants nothing more now than to get the hell out of the establishment he’s in. Curtis Eldridge (Gary Richardson), who has aspirations of becoming a thespian, is seen running in the gym at a speed that’s pumping his heart rate up to over 300 beats per minute as he watches the news. Sonny Football (John Reynolds, who also wrote this film) is pretty much tumbling off the roof of a house the first time we see him. Meanwhile, Katie Cartwright (Sofia Black D’Elia) is part of the news team relaying this to the local station.
The cast doesn’t stop there. The faculty are going through it just as much as their adult-sized students are. Ms. Jankey (Maria Thayer) is probably a little too earnest and sexually frustrated to be leading a sex ed part of her class. Mr. Whiley (Topher Grace) has written and is directing this year’s student play, all while seemingly under investigation from Todd (Zach Cherry), a returning student and current detective. And Principal Nadler (Ana Gasteyer) is on the brink of losing control of the school once again if her students don’t get their grades up. Among the foremost traits worth championing about Never Change! and Reynolds’s writing is the balance it demonstrates with this massive cast, not just in how it gives each player at least one noteworthy scene, but also allows many of them to play up to maximal effect some truly ridiculous characters and traits.
A marriage and a budding-affair subplot involving Katie ropes in her truly ridiculous husband while recurring some tried-and-true high school romance tropes with Sonny in a new comedic context. Curtis’s antics during the play’s rehearsal include an absolutely gut-busting, total loss of control over his body—which also happens to immediately point towards a deeply fraught past with battling aliens. Several parties are thrown by a man who’s just lost his parents and wants nothing but to throw ragers in his now-empty house, visibly fighting his way through the grief in a hilariously morbid way every time we see him. Profanities abound absolutely everywhere, in countless places where they don’t belong, even within the high school’s halls and production design. And yes, even the janitors are still holding on to ancient memories of the Class of ’08 with humorously awkward panache.
This smorgasbord of characters and messy situations doesn’t necessarily coalesce into a cohesive experience so much as it winds up creating a film that’s deeply comfortable in its own skin about the kind of absurd comedic heights it wants to reach. Whatever ideas this film has about the regression of adulthood, or how we adhere to and break away from the expectations of high school, are left to the side in favor of graphic gags, surprisingly competent uses of CGI, and a few clever narrative payoffs. Schousboe has been a frequent collaborator of comedian Joe Pera (who also makes a brief appearance in this film), directing several of Pera’s awkwardly modest, intently calming, and absurdist comedy specials and videos. As a result, it’s interesting to watch his collaboration with Reynolds instead pivot into a much noisier and differently irreverent brand of comedy predicated on clever forms of irony.
Never Change! isn’t the kind of comedy film you watch to get something out of it—and whether that’s a fault or a feature is more a question of intention than anything else. Solely for the sake of the ride that it takes you on, and the somewhat stylized nature of many scenes within it, Never Change! is probably best understood as a crowdpleaser designed to have an audience hollering the entire way through. At the time of writing this, my high school diploma is in sight, tucked away on a shelf in my childhood bedroom—and I wonder how I’d carry myself if I were ever forced to return to the halls of that place. And yes, I do wonder if I’d fare any better than the adults in Schousboe’s film, tasked with such an absurd and messy return to the adolescence that defined them more than they probably expected.
