Summer of 69

When high school senior Abby (Sam Morelos) discovers the boy for whom she pines prefers a specific position when it comes to physical amorousness (see: the title of the movie), she enlists an adult dancer named Santa Monica (Chole Fineman) as mentor. Abby promises to pay an exorbitant fee, which Santa Monica plans to use to buy the club where she works and therefore have something to brag about at her dreaded upcoming high school reunion, though you can likely discern whether Abby really has the money. All this would be enough to ensure “Summer of 69” is not screened at any Pope Leo XIV-themed Catholic church lock-ins, but even worse, Jillian Bell’s directorial debut is also sex positive and even worse than that, treats Santa Monica’s occupation with some respect. Perhaps the single best sequence is when Abby first glimpses her future tutor at work, marveling at how comfortable she is in her own body, the camera boxing out all the leering dudes and turning it into an empowering moment just between the two of them.

I don’t mean to overstate the case. “Summer of 69” delivers on the raunchy kind of comedy it promises. Not just in one-liners but in how Bell visually conveys jokes, like an early reveal of the club’s owner played by an on-point Paula Pell. (One complaint: there could have been more Paula Pell.) It is at its absolute best, though, when tying humor to its earnestness, both in the chemistry between Morelos and Fineman and in several sequences evincing Abby’s tendency to retreat to fantasy as a coping mechanism as she does during an imaginary haunted house non-reverie bringing to life her unfounded shame for the task she’s undertaking. When Abby pinches herself at one point to ensure she remains in the moment, it’s genuinely moving. Morelos and Fineman are so affecting together, in fact, that when the requisite narrative downturn moves them apart, the momentum demonstrably lags (even if the high school reunion scene works better than you think). That causes “Summer of 69” to feel overly long in the homestretch and at least in part blunt the impact of its conclusion even if it rebounds with a closing line that put a big smile on my face.