There might not be a delicate way to describe this, so let’s just get it out there: Our hero in Summer of 69 is Abby, a teen girl who has a crush on a boy named Max, who seems sweet but who Abby clearly feels is out of her league. She hears through the grapevine that the way to Max’s heart is through an… um… act that’s implied by the movie’s title. So the inexperienced Abby sets out to learn as much as she can about the ways of the bedroom, leading her to hire a stripper named Santa Monica to teach her the art of seduction. Santa Monica, meanwhile, takes the gig with Abby because she’s trying to raise enough money to keep her strip club from going under, as the club’s owner has run afoul of the IRS.
And so what we have is an homage to two different kinds of 1980s sex comedies, the teen version where a young person is getting into a bit of raunchy trouble, and the somewhat more adult version where some scantily clad women are trying to save their business from certain doom. But what Summer of 69 does quite well is to take these frames and use them more tastefully, or at least far less exploitatively, to tell a story that stays true to the raucous spirit of those ‘80s movies while also recognizing we’ve made a whole lot of progress in our social sensibilities. And thankfully, it does almost no wallowing in nostalgia—it makes only a few gestures at trying to point out to us that it’s calling back to 40 years ago, and it would be easy to watch the movie and never even think of the 1980s otherwise.
The movie is also exceptionally silly, which it knows and which it revels in, although as Abby and Santa Monica’s relationship develops the film becomes less purely entertaining and a little more interesting, leading us to a place we might not entirely expect. None of it ever becomes profound—at all—but it’s also not trying to. What it is is a clever reworking of a genre we might have thought was better left in the past.
Summer of 69 is on Hulu May 9th.
