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The guys who star in "Everybody Wants Some!!," director Richard Linklater's new comedy about a bunch of carousing college baseball players, weren't alive in 1980, when the movie is set.
That doesn't stop them from feeling a bit nostalgic for the period.
"My parents grew up in that era," said J. Quinton Johnson, who makes his movie debut in the film (opening Friday, April 22, in Salt Lake City) as Dale, the easygoing veteran player who takes the story's central character, freshman pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner), under his wing. "I was essentially playing my dad," Johnson said.
His dad's influence came into focus in one scene, when five of the players are driving around the Texas college town, singing along to the Sugar Hill Gang classic "Rapper's Delight."
"My dad would play that full 13-minute song on the way to school," Johnson said in a recent phone interview.
Few of the cast members had worked together before, so Linklater took his cast to a ranch for three weeks of rehearsal and workshopping.
As the guys got to know each other, said co-star Wyatt Russell, Linklater and the actors would make adjustments to the script to make characters conform to the dynamics forming among the cast.
"With all the guys, you're seeing life imitate art, or art imitate life," said Russell, who plays the blissed-out transfer student Willoughby.
Russell, who played minor-league hockey before an injury forced him to quit the game, compared Linklater to "a coach who instilled confidence in you the way you want him to instill confidence in you. He reminded us that he picked us for a reason."
For co-star Glen Powell, the three weeks of rehearsal helped him shape his character, Finnegan, the team's resident sage.
"In college, we all think we were cooler than we were," Powell said, adding that Finnegan "is based on the idea of who you wish you were in college. You had the best lines, nothing fazed you. A girl turned you down, you turned around and asked her again."
Powell (who co-stars on Fox's TV series "Scream Queens") said Linklater let the cast rummage around the wardrobe trailer, "let us go in there and just explore," to find the right look for the characters. That's where Powell found a pipe, which Finnegan smokes and carries around to give his words the appearance of added wisdom.
Wisdom also is Willoughby's strong suit, much of it dispensed in a marijuana-fueled haze.
"He's the only one that has any type of life experience," said Russell, whose résumé includes the indie thriller "Cold in July" and the comedy "22 Jump Street." (Russell is also a child of Hollywood; his parents are Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn.)
If "Everybody Wants Some!!" is going to be compared to Linklater's 1993 cult classic "Dazed and Confused" — another backward-looking story, set in 1976 — Willoughby is the corollary to Wooderson, the older guy hanging out with high-schoolers, played by a then-unknown Matthew McConaughey.
"They're both sad characters," Russell said of Willoughby and Wooderson.
And, as in "Dazed and Confused," the cast members of "Everybody Wants Some!!" think their movie has a chance at movie immortality.
"I'm hoping it lasts," Powell said. "It has the potential to be a cult classic. … We're part of the Linklater tradition, which is a cool club to be in."
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