Devery Jacobs in Backspot (TIFF)

Cheerleading isn’t just for petite and popular girls anymore. In the opening sequence of D.W. Waterson’s directorial debut, strong young female bodies land hard onto masses of other bodies, hurtle like cannonballs out of a gun, tumble backwards on a punishing gym floor. You wanna piece of the new cheerleading? the film seems to ask. The 2024 edition of the sport is athletically tough and ready to choose blows over beauty. Having set this standard of rigor in the first few minutes, Backspot struggles to keep the juice flowing in the rest of its running time.

Riley (Reservation Dogs’s Devery Jacobs) is a junior cheerleader on her high school team. She and her girlfriend, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), aim to join the Thunderhawks, the elite competitive squad coached by sexy blonde lesbian hard-ass Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood). After an act of showy disobedience of the sort that wins hotly contested positions only in the movies, Riley snags Eileen’s grudging approval for a spot alongside her sweetheart and another friend. But Riley wrestles with anxiety and low self-esteem, and a large portion of the plot is devoted to seeing the heroine battle through these obstacles to her rightful victorious place on the gym floor.

One of the first clues that Riley suffers from stress comes in the form of a grotesque close-up of her pulling hair from her eyebrow—as symptoms of angst go, a fairly mild one. Other details feel as underwhelming. Trouble at home is signaled by awkward but hardly terrible conversations with Riley’s mom (former model Shannyn Sossamon, looking as though she’s just bopped out of a session at the beauty parlor). Riley’s relationship with Amanda is loving and supportive, but feels more like a puppy love romance out of middle school and not high school.

Trying to satisfy her demanding coach, Riley has one freakout heightened by kinetic camerawork and doomsday music. But other than that, her troubles seem fairly low stakes. With gritted teeth and determined looks, Jacobs uses her considerable screen presence to raise the ante for Riley, but the script doesn’t give her much on which to base a fully realized character.

Backspot does cut a swathe by immersing us in rough workouts, reveling in the punishment today’s cheerleaders take. It then oddly backtracks on that vision with an end sequence where the Thunderhawks perform a sickly sweet routine in what look like Minnie Mouse outfits with frilly skirts, purple noses, and enormous false eyelashes. Definitely a puzzling end for a movie that has been a little uncertain on its feet all along.