Poehler’s female-empowerment film is like Booksmart or Election – with all the humour and satire stripped out
A high-school movie directed by Amy Poehler, the SNL comedy blackbelt who starred in Parks and Recreation? And who is incidentally the longtime performing partner of Tina Fey, who created the high-school classic Mean Girls? Is this going to be hilarious, or what?
Sadly no. Solemnly based on a novel by YA author Jennifer Mathieu, Moxie could be called Nice Girls or Mutually Supportive Girls. Poehler herself has a small role as the single mom of a smart, lonely teenage girl called Vivian (Hadley Robinson) who is best friends with Claudia (Lauren Tsai), but whose intimacy with her is about to be damaged by her admiration for supercool new girl Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña), and her growing romantic situation with the impeccably right-on and pro-feminist supportive guy Seth (Nico Hiraga). Enraged by the boorish, sexist behaviour of the obnoxious football star Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger), and the way he is indulged by the school, Vivian gets inspired by her mom’s long-since forgotten protest persona, and she starts a zine called Moxie and triggers a feminist revolution at the school which challenges her friendships and her sense of herself.
