Funny and Charming, Summer of 69 Has Trouble Concentrating on Two Characters at Once

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.