Rowan Blanchard and Auli'i Cravalho in Crush. Courtesy of Hulu.
In many ways, Crush is your typical high school coming-of-age romantic comedy that falls into all the genre trappings. An endearingly awkward lead, quirky side characters including a too-comfortable mom, a quick music-driven pace, melodramatic heart-to-hearts, and, of course, a third act public confession in front of the whole school — but that familiarity is a feature, not a bug. While Kirsten King and Casey Rackham‘s screenplay is often too adorkable and low stakes for its own good, it's never less than charming — and queer kids deserve silly high school romantic comedies of their own. Rowan Blanchard and Auli'i Cravalho, best known as the voice of Moana, have enough charisma to power through the movie's expected beats that it's impossible not to fall for them.
Crush will be available exclusively on Hulu on April 29.
Paige (Rowan Blanchard) is your typical awkward high school junior with her dreams set on attending a summer program at The California Institute of the Arts. There's just one problem: she has artist's block. The prompt is to create a piece around her happiest moment. In the movie's breezy intro, she considers the moment she came out to her mother (a delightful Megan Mullally), but that daydream is broken when her mother gifts her with glow-in-the-dark dental dams. Some parents are too supportive. The next she considers is when she told her straight best friend Dylan (Tyler Alvarez) she liked girls, but that option is kiboshed by his unremarkable reaction: “I like girls too.”
Then, she considers a moment she has completely gotten over: when she first formed her crush on school it-girl Gabby (Isabella Ferreira). Crush immediately drew me in with the way it treated its queer themes — as if there's nothing to see here. This isn't a coming out movie like many other queer high school rom-coms. In one scene, Coach Murray (scene-stealing Aasif Mandvi), the school's track coach, hands out keys for the hotel rooms for an away meet and quips: “do not go in each other's rooms, even though I know 60% of you are queer.” It's refreshing that this isn't where the movie derives its plot and tension.
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Instead, the story surrounds the mystery of “King Pun,” a graffiti artist and social media star who has anonymously been vandalizing the school with their punny artwork. The problem is the school's principal (Michelle Buteau) is convinced that Paige is King Pun and is threatening her with suspension threatening her CalArts hopes. However, Paige is able to strike a deal. If she can find the real identity of the vandal before the semester's end she can avoid suspension. The catch is she has to join the school's track team — yeah, it's a bit of sweaty plot manuevering — that Gabby is co-captain of with her twin AJ (Auli'i Cravalho). Of course, hijinks ensue including a montage of Paige embarrassing herself at practice, which leads Coach Murray to assign AJ as her trainer.
You could probably figure out the story from there.
Through all the cute crushing back and forth between the triangle of girls, we get bits of their internal life — AJ feels pressure from her father and living up to her sister's success, Gabby feels like people use her because she's popular, Paige has never been kissed. But Crush isn't precious about these issues and keeps much of its exploration surface-level — to both its benefit and detriment. Do you yearn to learn more about the characters? Or course. Is it refreshing for a movie not to be distracted by deeper themes in service of its simpler story? Yes.
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Blanchard and, in particular, Cravalho are irresistibly charming as the romance leads while the rest of the cast — Alvarez and Mandi, in particular — provides the much-needed goofs and laughs. There are some hilarious one-liners like “trigger warning, there will be a gunshot to start but it's fake” and “you look like a serial killer, change your eyes,” that catch you off guard in such a sweet movie.
There's a sense that movies targeted at the LGBTQ+ community need to be about something whether our queerness or our trauma. For all its formulaic stereotypical corniness, Crush‘s normalization of its queer characters is what makes it a joy to watch. It doesn't ignore it either, it just decenters it in the narrative allowing kids and teens to see that a queer life isn't just darkness. They can have silly crushes too. And sometimes those crushes turn into something more. We need more movies like Crush.
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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.
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