【Eric Falk】

It'd be Eric Falkincorrect to say there's never been a movie like Blockersbefore. It's a teen sex comedy in the vein of American Pieor Superbad, with a similar focus on teens trying to get laid on prom night.

But it's certainly true that the specifics of Blockersmake it a rarity.

For starters, the horny high schoolers in questions are girls, not boys. The story belongs just as much to their parents, who are desperate to stop them. And the filmmaker at the helm is a woman – Pitch Perfectwriter Kay Cannon, making her directorial debut.

"I really wanted to tell the story from a female perspective," she told Mashable over the phone. "I felt like it hadn't been told before."

SEE ALSO: 'Blockers' isn't the sex-panic movie you think it is. It's way better.

Blockersdidn't originate with Cannon. The script by Jim and Brian Kehoe first landed on the Black List in 2012, when it was still called Cherriesand revolved around three dads desperate to stop their daughters from losing their virginities.

However, Cannon gave it her own spin when she got ahold of the script a few years later. One of the dads became a mom (Leslie Mann's Lisa). More crucially, the daughters were upgraded to co-leads instead of supporting players. "I wanted the audience not to be sure of who they were gonna root for," she said.

Blockers is the celebration of sexual agency that we need in 2018

The result is an uproarious comedy that's smarter than it looks, and slyly feminist in its sexual politics. Though Blockerswas in the works long before #MeToo, it feels like a much-needed tonic to our fraught sexual landscape. If #MeToo and its related movements remind us about the dangers of male sexual entitlement, Blockerscelebrates the joys of female sexual agency, particularly for girls who are just learning how to wield it.

"There's still this idea that young women are damsels in distress," said Cannon. "And then when you hear bad things that happen to young women, whether it's on a college campus of whatever, their fear just gets fueled."

"I really just wanted to show parents that they don't have to be as afraid as they are."

Blockers, though, paints a more optimistic picture. Each of the girls have her own reasons for wanting to have sex, and each of their dates has his own hopes for the evening. But it's something these teenagers navigate together, with mutual respect and affection and not a little bit of clumsiness, and all of them come out the other side unscathed.

"The truth is that, sure, bad things happen," Cannon acknowledged. "But for a lot of young women, it's exactly what [a character in the movie] says – 'it was short, kind of awkward, it hurt a little bit.' It's a part of growing up, you know?"

Besides, she points out, most of these terrified parents have gone through the same thing. "I really just wanted to show parents that they don't have to be as afraid as they are, and to remind them what it was like when they were also going through that, and that they would have thought, 'Hey parents, you don't have to be as afraid as you are,' and that it's actually sweet."

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Blockers digs into the divide between ideals and actions

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Then again, it's one thing for a parent to know intellectually that their child will probably be okay. It's another thing entirely for them to feel comfortable relinquishing control, and allowing their kids to make their own decisions.

The parents of Blockersaren't especially conservative about sex. Even the most traditional of the bunch, John Cena's Mitchell, agrees that his daughter should have the same freedoms that a boy would. Nevertheless, they can't help projecting their own fears and their own baggage onto their kids.

"It’s less about stopping girls from having sex and more about a parent letting go of their kid."

It's a tension that Cannon, herself the parent of a young daughter, gets all too well. "I am a pretty progressive parent, but I could understand and emphasize with Lisa," she admitted. "My daughter was two at the time, and she's just so beautiful and perfect and awesome and smart and all these things, and one day she'll grow up and will get hurt or will want to have sex, and I hope it's with the right person, and I hope she loves herself."

The same motivation drives the parents of Blockers. "It’s less about stopping girls from having sex and more about a parent letting go of their kid," whether it's Lisa clinging to college-bound Julie (Kathryn Newman), Mitchell trying to protect Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan), or Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) going a little too far to encourage Sam (Gideon Adlon) to be herself.

Blockersunderstands that sex panic isn't really about sex itself, but about agency and control. And that even well-intentioned guardians can cross the line. And that ultimately, a girl's body belongs to her – no matter how uncomfortable other people might be about her decisions.

Blockers is unusually nuanced about the sexuality of teen girls

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Or, for that matter, what the reasoning is behind those decisions. Julie and Kayla's goals are pretty straightforward – the former dreams of a romantic night with her boyfriend, while the latter just wants to have some fun.

Sam's are a little more complicated. She's still figuring out her sexuality, so even though she's clearly got a crush on a female classmate, she figures she ought to experiment with her male date. "I wanted to show what I had been hearing and what I think has been happening in school of just, like, confusion – when you're confused, but not depressed," said Cannon. "Where it's just sort of a grappling with it, as opposed to anything that's life or death."

"I feel like what gets dismissed is that girls have the same desires and wants that guys do."

What upsets Sam's dad isn't that she's having sex, but that he suspects she's being peer-pressured into doing it with a guy instead of a girl. His concern is understandable, especially as we see how much happier and more comfortable Sam is with Angelica. Still, the film makes clear that this is still Sam's decision to make, not Hunter's.

As Cannon puts it, Blockersis "all about their motivations," which is rarely the case in teen comedies about boys chasing after girls. "I feel like what gets dismissed or never shown is that [girls] have the same desires and wants that guys do. They're just not horndogs about it." said Cannon.

"I think when it's reversed, when you're showing guys like in American Pie, the girls are objects of desire. It's more about what their looks are, and less about what they think or what they care about."

Blockers shows us why we need more female filmmakers

Kay Cannon and her cast introduce Blockers ahead of its world premiere at SXSW. Credit: Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images for SXSW

Which brings us back to Cannon, and the female perspective she brought to this traditionally male genre. It's under her leadership that Blockersfound the balance between the parents and the girls that makes it work so well.

"That came from really working on who they were as people, who they were as friends, what was their worldview," she said. "And then also, we did a lot of work on their dates, and tried to make sure that they were guys that were interesting and funny."

One key character who changed in the process was Kayla's date Connor, who went from what Cannon describes as "just an awful, awful dude" in earlier drafts to a still-sketchy but much sweeter dude under Cannon's watch. His likability complicates the dad-daughter dynamic, since we can see both why Kayla likes him and why Mitchell doesn't, which in turn makes Blockersa deeper, smarter, and funnier movie.

While it's impossible to know how Blockersmight have fared under a male director, it's easy to see how it benefited from a female one. Unfortunately, women directors are still a rarity in the industry – but Cannon points out that "the powers can be" can start to change things by "taking a chance."

"They need to actively seek out talented women. We're everywhere," she said. "And to not be so insular. I think if they do that, they'll reap the benefits of that. But they have to actively seek it out."

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