For Author Kase Wickman, ‘Bring It On’ Isn’t Just Another Teen Movie

“Ready? OK!” 

Culture journalist Kase Wickman starts her new book, Bring It On: The Complete Story of the Cheerleading Movie That Changed, Like, Everything (No, Seriously), with a cheer and a declaration: “Let’s just say it, loud, right into the megaphone for the folks in the back: Bring It On deserves a place in the cinematic canon and recognition as an Important Film.”

Bring It On was part of a poppy teen movie boom when it burst into theaters in 2000, led by Kirsten Dunst and Gabrielle Union as competing cheer captains—two stars who would stand the test of time. But when Wickman reexamined Bring It On in 2015, as a staffer at MTV News compiling an oral history of the film for its 15th anniversary, she was struck by its feminism, its tackling of cultural appropriation (namely, Dunst’s all-white Toros squad stealing cheers—including the famed “Brrr, it’s cold in here” routine—from the predominantly Black East Compton Clovers), and its behind-the-scenes links to Oscar winners. Wickman writes that Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme helped get it greenlit, and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins uses Bring It On screenwriter Jessica Bendinger’s outlining technique when drafting his own scripts. 

“If you were to very blandly say, ‘Well, it’s about two cheerleading teams,’ you would not imagine all the various shades of amazing about this movie,” Wickman tells Vogue. (For one thing: The cinematic reference for its opening shot of Union’s Isis? Citizen Kane.) 

Wickman spoke with Vogue about Bring It On’s legacy, its connection to Michelle Obama and Melania Trump, and its bonafides as one of the greatest sports movies ever made.

Vogue: You were 12 years old in your native Oregon when you first watched Bring It On. Did you ever envision that it would later be the subject of your passion project? 

Kase Wickman: Honestly, most of what I remember taking from this was, “Wait, I really want Kirsten Dunst’s haircut”—and now, decades later, I finally have that little wavy bob—and I was like, “People can wear bras as shirts? Who knew?” I never could have imagined, [as a tween] saying “I’m going to write a book some day,” that it would be a behemoth examination of Bring It On.

Right up front, you write that Bring It On “deserves a place in the cinematic canon and recognition as an Important Film.” Can we infer that you don’t think that it’s given that level of respect currently? 

I don’t. There’s a reason that it’s a provocative thing when someone gets on on Twitter and says Bring It On is one of the best sports movies of all time, or the best sports movie of all time, or just a great movie. People want to write it off as this nothing teen movie, but you look at other sports movies, and they’re pretty much invariably male-led. They’ll be about high school, but the difference is that they’re things that the discourse feels comfortable taking seriously. One of the [Bring It On] producers said, “Movies about basketball players who want to get a scholarship and escape their small town… No one’s like, ‘Stupid!’” With cheerleading, [people] are like, hmm.

I underlined your reference to Bring It On  as “one of the greatest sports movies of all time.” I think perceptions may have changed a little with Netflix’s Cheer, but will it ever be taken seriously as a sports movie as long as people devalue cheerleading as a sport? 

I hope that people value it as a sports movie, after watching both this and Cheer. Cheer is definitely in the family lineage of Bring It On. They can’t even get past the first or second episode without mentioning it. I think that people see the work and art that goes into it more now than they used to, but there’s still kind of a, “Well…is it?”