They’d long taken influences from everywhere: Baker sang on the latest album from hardcore fixtures Touche Amore, and Bridgers cut the definitive cover versions of both Tom Petty’s “It’ll All Work Out” and Mark Kozelek’s wife-murder ballad “You Missed My Heart.” Yet they were also growing weary of blithe, constant comparisons to female peers around their same age (Mitski, Soccer Mommy and Jay Som would probably nod in recognition). The three were all friends or fans of each other beforehand and on the whole, they’ve welcomed this new wave of incisive, assertive female singer-songwriters coming up alongside them.
The concept for Boygenius began as soon as they booked their upcoming tour together (they hit the Wiltern Nov. “The way to rebut that is to do things like this, to model collaboration with whatever influence we have.”
“Competitiveness is destructive and it’s forced particularly upon women, who are told the myth that there’s a finite amount of room for them,” Baker said. But for tweens, it's an entertaining pick with a charming cast.What had started as an in-joke about oblivious bros quickly turned into a life-affirming new way to write music together. The script falters in its preoccupation with Emmett's crush (for someone who's such a prodigy, it seems rather immature that he thinks a 16- or 17-year-old could return his affection), and the resolution of the crime investigation ends up feeling a bit anticlimactic. It's revealed that Emmett and Luke's dead father, who was also incredibly intelligent, had a mental illness, and Emmett worries, relatably, that he'll follow in his father's footsteps. There aren't enough movies about multigenerational friendships, so it's nice to see Emmett learning from Mary.Īlthough Boy Genius' plot is rather thin, the filmmakers do include a few surprisingly substantive conversations and themes in the story. There's a particularly funny moment when Mary barges into a high school party and plays Naughty by Nature's "Hip Hop Hooray" to give Emmett more time to investigate a classmate's bedroom. Brown's precocious Emmett and Wilson's eccentric Mary have a charming intergenerational friendship as they attempt to use her true-crime know-how and his super intelligence to find the real thief. This child-prodigy comedy is familiar and funny enough to amuse younger viewers but doesn't stand out quite as much as its main character does. Themes also include curiosity, the danger of making assumptions about others, and thinking of failure as a learning opportunity. There are several conversations about race and privilege, as well as one mature-for-young-viewers discussion about marriage, adultery, mental illness, suicide, and betrayal. Expect some insults ("pathetic," "loser," "home-wrecker," "stupid," etc.), an unsupervised party where high school students drink and a character waves a baggie of weed around (but no one partakes), and a fight that leaves Emmett with a bloody lip and the other guy on the ground after being punched in the face.
Like many comedies about super-smart kids, the movie makes jokes about Emmett's personality - his maturity level, his overly formal speech, and his borderline-inappropriate, unrequited crush on a girl who's at least four to five years older than he is.
Parents need to know that Boy Genius is a comedy about Emmett ( Blackish star Miles Brown), a 12-year-old prodigy who teams up with his eccentric test-prep instructor ( Rita Wilson) to figure out who's behind a series of thefts at his high school.