It’s understandable, even thematically fitting, that the new Netflix teen comedy Incoming looks up to Superbad like a younger brother idolizing his cool older siblings. Superbad may not itself be about the cool kids, but in terms of one-wild-night teen comedies, it’s just about the funniest and best-made version we’ve seen so far this century—something for any comic filmmaker to admire. So when Incoming rips it off, it’s hard to sustain much ill will. In fact, quite the opposite: The movie’s aspirations earn it a line of credit that it may not actually deserve.
Reversing the vantage of Superbad’s about-to-graduate seniors, Incoming centers on four insecure friends who have just begun their freshman year of high school. Otherwise, the characters line up pretty easily: Benj (Mason Thames) is the sweetly nerdy Michael Cera type nursing a longtime crush on Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), his year-older sister’s bestie; Danah (Bardia Seiri) is the Jonah Hill wannabe wild man, whose older brother is throwing a school-kickoff rager, where both he and Benj hope to get lucky and cement their high-school coolness; and Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Connor (Raphael Alejandro) share the McLovin-style side adventure, as two nerdier guys who don’t make it to the party and wind up driving around all night instead. (Connor even gets an immediate nickname, albeit a less triumphant one, not of his choosing.)
These aren’t the only story threads running through Incoming, which writer-directors Dave and John Chernin sometimes let wander into a Can’t Hardly Wait-style ensemble. Bobby Cannavale is on hand as a cool but lonely science teacher who winds up partying with his students, essentially doing a longer-form version of the Saturday Night Live “Party Song” video from a few years back. Eddie and Connor wind up chauffeuring around a drunken Katrina (Loren Gray), the school’s most popular online influencer; Benj’s sister Alyssa (Ali Gallo) starts to come to terms with her own insecurities; lots of people learn, or half-learn, to be themselves, rather than trying to be cool.
