Among the many gifted caricaturists and comedians on the current cast of Saturday Night Live, Chloe Fineman is the sketch player who seems the most attuned to digital image-making – the ways that younger people construct real-world identities out of online bits, attempting to turn their virtual worlds real. (Maybe that’s just a polite way of saying she seems more specifically online than a lot of her coworkers.) That combination of confidence and primped-out illusion makes Fineman a great choice to play an exotic dancer catering to both her own style and an expected audience, even if only the comedy version. Though virginal teenager Abby Flores (Sam Morelos) has expressed no previous interest in the art of exotic dancing, it’s weirdly easy to believe that after beholding the majesty of Santa Monica (Fineman), she would become convinced that this young woman should serve as her sexual mentor.
Summer of 69 sometimes feels as if it has arrived at this situation by working backwards from the title, mostly in an appealingly cute way. The movie is, ah, not set in 1969. Abby is a contemporary high school senior, sheltered by her good-girl nature and Catholic-high-school upbringing – though she observes that most of her classmates nonetheless seem more sexually experienced than she is. That group includes Max (Matt Cornett), her longtime crush, recently single following the demise of a years-long relationship with a popular girl. Determined to make the upcoming summer count, Abby resolves to seduce him (and gain some pre-college experience while she’s at it). Her reliable informant (the kid who wears her school’s mascot costume, of course) tells her Max favors a particular sexual position – not coincidentally, exactly the kind of thing teenage boys are likely to chortle about in theory far more than they’re able to put it into practice, though Abby doesn’t seem to know this – and she makes performing that act with Max her end-of-school-year goal.
Really, though, she approaches Santa Monica looking for the kind of big-sister/older-bestie guidance she clearly lacks from her life as a well-behaved only child with a lucrative side hustle streaming horror video games. That’s where she gets the money she offers to pay the reluctant dancer for her tutelage; this may be in turn be enough for Santa Monica to save the local strip club from financial mismanagement and a predatory new owner (Charlie Day). So yeah, it’s Superbad, it’s Booksmart, it’ s American Pie, it’s The House Bunny, and, sure, it’s a little bit Risky Business, which despite the aforementioned closer matches is the movie’s ambitious and most-mentioned reference point.
Director and cowriter Jillian Bell should have a sense of how to steer the movie toward Fineman’s strengths; though they didn’t overlap at Saturday Night Live, Bell did write there for a season, and is a talented comic performer herself. Yet the real breakout here is Morelos, who appeared on the Netflix sitcom That ’90s Show as a more worldly form of nerd. Here, she makes her naiveté and self-consciousness winning, charming, and very funny, and her occasional forays into physical comedy feel natural. She strikes that perfect semi-glossy teen-movie balance between honest awkwardness and secret poise.
Santa Monica, meanwhile, keeps slipping into the cracks between a different ideas about who she might be. The screenplay groans a little, contorting itself to make it clear that she’s a sex worker sometimes disgusted by her customers’ behavior, but not ashamed of herself; superficial and sometimes dismissive of her dorky charge, but not dumb; empowered enough to stand up for herself, but not purely altruistic; a potential girlboss, but not a problematic one. A real-life person could contain these multitudes, of course, but Summer of 69 never seems certain about how real it wants or needs Santa Monica to be, and Fineman, as a nimble sketch performer, winds up gamely shifting her approach from scene to scene. It’s the kind of role Anna Faris has attacked with gusto, and for all of its sex jokes, Summer of 69 is a little too timid to let anyone attack anything. Its admirable refusal to look down on its exotic dancer characters eventually turns cautious and a little too cute, even as some of the strip-club scenes get laughs. (As a corollary to Jonah Hill’s Funny People line about how there’s nothing funny about a physically fit man: There’s not much funny about a beautiful woman who is good at dancing, either.) For a comedy, this material verges on fantastical in a bad way, almost appearing squeamish about the true messiness of sex.
In other moments, though, Bell pushes into more genuine fantasy with an inviting visual sensibility not often seen in studio comedies. Abby’s lapses into daydreams are, at times, genuinely dreamy; I could swear that at one point, Bell was taking inspiration from a particularly lovely slow-motion musical number in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. If the movie’s adult characters are conveniences, its evocation of teenage yearning-slash-horniness (and the ways those can get mixed up) feels pretty real, even in the more outlandish moments. Bell lights her scenes with a kind of suburban lushness, avoiding the plastic Netflix glare of so many discount-bin teen movies. This Hulu acquisition could have played fine in a theater. Then again, maybe it’s best to get a sweet-natured sex comedy out to sleepovers as soon as possible.
Director: Jillian Bell Writers: Jillian Bell, Liz Nico, Jules Byrne Starring: Sam Morelos, Chloe Fineman, Matt Cornett, Paula Pell, Charlie Day, Natalie Morales Release Date: May 9, 2025 (Hulu)
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
