I don’t know how Fast Times at Ridgemont High did it. I don’t know how that film managed to assemble a cast that included Sean Penn, Judge Reinhold, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz and Nicolas Cage, all before any of them became household names. Even the lesser-known cast members like Robert Romanus and Brian Backer have very extensive IMDB pages, with practically nada before this film.

And the film itself… ehh.

I’m not really sure how to describe this movie in terms of plot because it doesn’t really have one. There’s no distinct beginning, end or even a climax to speak of, just a bunch of separate storylines that wind their way through the film and occasionally bump into each other. There’s really nothing at stake in this narrative and aside from a couple of lessons learned, the status pretty much ends up quo. Ultimately, it’s nothing more or less than just a slice of these characters’ lives.

The characters themselves are mostly what you’d expect: There’s the stoner comedy relief (Penn), the douchebag who thinks he’s God’s gift to women (Romanus), the guy trying to make an honest living (Reinhold), the sad sack looking for love (Backer), the girl discovering her sexuality (Leigh), the best friend/source of advice (Cates) and of course, the impossibly dickish teacher (Ray Walston). A few of them grow over the course of the movie as their arcs twist in intriguing and unexpected (sometimes dark) ways, and others don’t. They’re all more or less stock characters, yet their dialogue and performances are enough to provide some illusion of depth and make them at least somewhat relatable.

The rest of the film comes down to Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling. Crowe wrote an amazing script for this movie, filled with quotable dialogue delivered by sympathetic (albeit slightly cookie-cutter) characters and Heckerling effectively squeezed all the comedy she could out of it. Perhaps my favorite example is in what Spicoli does with Jefferson’s (that is to say, Whitaker’s) car. That whole segment was so clever and so funny that I was in stitches through the whole thing.

Then we have the storylines with Leigh and Cates. In their blowjob lesson, I saw the humor, sex appeal and sincerity that countless teen rom-coms have been trying to emulate ever since this film’s release. Additionally, Cates’ famous pool sequence may well be the greatest nude scene in film history, and Leigh… well, let’s just say that Somebody’s Baby is now one of my all-time favorite love songs.

Oh my God, the soundtrack to this film was awesome. It was a huge nostalgia bomb, loaded with one amazing classic rock song after another. I don’t know what else to say about this soundtrack except that the songs were all perfectly chosen for their respective contexts and I’d love to have the whole thing as an album MP3 playlist.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High does have its flaws. I personally would’ve preferred a more structured and focused narrative, but maybe the looser and more rambling structure is part of its charm. In any case, I have to give it props for being a rare sex comedy that actually succeeds in being both sexy and comedic. The realistic dialogue, the stellar soundtrack and the deceptively powerful cast all help a lot as well. I’m not sure it qualifies as “classic” material, but it definitely merits a look.