Netflix’s new teen comedy Moxie — directed by Amy Poehler, who also stars as the protagonist’s mother — aims for riot grrrl rage and radical girl power action, and tries its best to be intersectional with its stellar cast. The retro-titled Moxie, based on the 2017 novel by Jennifer Mathieu, is a likable and well-performed comedy about teen feminism that should strike a chord with young women increasingly aware of the gender-biased system flagrantly rigged against them.
Moxie follows Vivian (Hadley Robinson), a seemingly shy 16-year-old, along with her lifelong best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai), who mostly keeps her head down at Rockport High. Every year, a group of popular boys, led by football captain Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger, the charming-douchebag), publish a ranking of female students by handing out degrading titles like “Most Bangable” and “Best Rack” etc. The arrival of a new student (Alycia Pascual-Peña) marks the first time Vivian and the girls see someone taking a stand against the unchecked sexist behaviour of their male student body running rampant at her high school.
The school’s principal (Marcia Gay Harden) is nefariously dismissive of Mitchell’s obvious problematic behavioural patter, and Ike Barinholtz plays a teacher who plays his cards too politically correct to express support for the female students clearly in need of attention.
Vivian suddenly discovers feminism partially because of unearthing the radical zines and Bikini Kill tracks of her mother’s radical youth and partially through help of new friends. She joins the fight for female solidarity and anonymously publishes an underground zine called Moxie to expose bias and wrongdoing in her high school. This sparks a movement. Now at the center of a revolution, these young women and their allies navigate the highs and lows of high school together.
However, at one point when a group of teenage girls are venting by themselves about their experience with problematic boys, one girl while shuffling a deck of playing cards, says, “You know what I just realized? The king is worth more than the queen,” she bursts with absolute shock showing on her face. “Why? The queen is the best. The queen can have kids.” – That weirdly contrived wokeness is what bogs Moxie down. Some individual parts of Moxie, come off as awkward and out of place. Like how despite illustrating the mom to be her main inspiration, Vivian never actually seeks input from her mom. Generally, it’s satisfying to see Vivian’s evolution from shy wallflower to leader emboldened by anonymity who stands up for herself and her peers. Moxie grows from a one-woman anonymous publication into a core group of students rallying for change.
The whole point of Moxie as a movement at the high school is to promote collective action against the administration and the boys who are protected by the patriarchal systems. Some of the best scenes feature the whole Moxie crew which just let these characters have personalities, like when Vivian and Lucy go on a thrift shop trip together. Other times the girls acting goofy amongst themselves feel like real teen girls here, and not mere mouthpieces for the messages Moxie wants to shout.
It came as a surprising note to watch Lucy and Amaya enthusiastically kiss without a whole Coming Out Arc — that they’re allowed to be comfortably and joyfully queer. But the only romance that gets a follow-up remains Vivian’s heterosexual relationship with sweet skater boy Seth (Nico Hiraga). Trans student CJ (Josie Totah) also gets a small subplot- the culmination of which slowly but definitely makes you think to yourself how all the side characters are infinitely more interesting than Vivian, and the injustices they experience have much deeper implications than issues as mainstream as the dress code.
The movie’s greatest disservice is it builds up all the pieces to scream intersectionality, but ultimately, it’s more a story about Vivian than about Moxie.
Vivian never meaningfully deals with how she inherently benefits from privileges that her friends do not: she’s white, able-bodied, and cisgender. Moxie pits Kiera against Mitchell for an athletic scholarship, but the focus stays on Vivian’s sadness and frustration after its fallout. Her relationship with her best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai) brings this across most directly. Claudia comes from a first-generation Chinese family where she feels an immense pressure to academically succeed, but Vivian gets increasingly frustrated with Claudia for not joining in on Moxie’s more rebellious activities. When Claudia calls Vivian out for her callous behaviour, Vivian’s immediate aftermath is to create scene with her mother for not being a good enough mother- the scene oozes off her white privilege and that she never actually absorbed any of Claudia’s monologue.
To Moxie’s credit, Vivian’s selfish attitude does eventually get addressed regarding her mother, best friend and boyfriend. With a sudden revelation in its final hour, Moxie zooms out way beyond Vivian and depicts sharply how allegedly innocuous and normalized things actually carry evidence of crimes extremely harmful.
A killer soundtrack and its compelling cast add the charm to Moxie. Its smart that Vivian admits herself that she lacks the moxie her friends have, but in contradiction, Moxie however felt more like the rage and reckoning encapsulated in one of the final images of the movie: a massive crowd of girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Smart casting is key to Moxie’s appeal, performance by rising star Robinson (previously best known for TV’s Utopia), who hits a well-judged balance between sympathetic, stroppy and occasionally sanctimonious, and everyone else supporting her storyline do their work perfectly. Overall, the film is full of gleeful moments of victory, sweet and specific character developments. Moxie earns a 8/10 from UpThrust.
Tackling the aspects of toxic masculinity and breaking the organic conformity that had been accepting said behaviors, Moxie admirably highlights vivaciously underrepresented issues from a clever adolescent perspective. Moxie’s script unabashedly confronts pervasive societal issues through a critical perspective as well as attempts to encompass the full spectrum of high school life alongside their thematic headline of rebel feminists- a roller coaster of friendship drama, dating, mother-daughter dynamics, and bullies. When it comes to tackling the potent thematic dynamics, Moxie initiates discourse playing their principal and male teacher to demonstrate the underlying nuances of how institutional representation towards sexual harassment, abuse, and society’s placating of young men’s vitriolic behaviour add to the internal/external pressures young women are groomed amidst.
I finished Moxie feeling that a bit more focus into the script and perhaps taking on less nuances would’ve allowed it to become a new young adult staple because of the infectious energy of the characters’ youthful spirits. The decision to craft a feminist project speaking to younger viewers offers something the Hollywood marketplace clearly requires more of.
