Just One of the Guys popped up in my Year of 1985 Review. It’s about a high school girl who pretends to be a boy. I did not see it back in the day, but time is a flat circle. Thanks to streaming, movies like this are now only a moment away. Always.
How will this film work in 2026? Lots of people pretend to be boys or girls nowadays. It’s a confusing time for everyone except the perverts…
Just One of the Guys
Just One of the Guys is based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. That makes it sound more legit than the average teen comedy. It’s not. While it generally works as a teen film, it hardly works at all as a comedy film.
This goes back to polemicist Christopher Hitchens’s famous Vanity Fair article: Why Women Aren’t Funny. Watching Just One of the Guys, a person can’t help but think, okay, maybe Hitchens was onto something.
Men dressing up as women is a gag often used to great effect (and to strip power from male entertainers, if you subscribe to Katt Williams’ newsletter).
Popular movies of this ilk can be rattled off easily: Mrs. Doubtfire, Ladybugs, White Chicks, Tootsie and Tyler Perry movies. Kurt Russell even dressed up as the world’s ugliest woman in Tango & Cash.
Yet, how often do we see movies where women dress up as men? We got Just One of the Guys, Shakespeare in Love and maybe something featuring Joan of Arc? Certainly, others exist, but they have no real legacy.
The reverse UNO card is not as funny in this instance, and the phenomenon stretches further than crossdressing. Female comedians can often be summed up with two jokes: I’m a whore and menstruation.
Some ladies bridge the divide. Kristen Wiig is funny. Tina Fey can get off some zingers. Rosanne Barr was a force. Lucille Ball, Madelaine Kahn and Carl Burnett all did memorable work.
Yet, the inescapable fact remains: the most famous comedian list is dominated by men. For example, The Comedy Central Top 100 contains only 10 females, and some of those are a stretch. Does anyone seriously consider Sandra Bernhard a giant of the field?
Well, maybe just her lips…
Just One More Night Of The Guys
Since Just One of the Guys is female-centric, the above stats put it behind the eight ball from the start as a comedy. This goes beyond the main character. Lisa Gottlieb (probably not related to Jaws writer Carl Gottlieb) directs.
Not only did Gottlieb helm Just One of the Guys, she co-wrote six drafts of the screenplay, so her sensibilities are all over the film.
Gottlieb’s resume includes teaching at the Ringling College of Art and Design, the University of Miami School of Communication, the University of Southern California School of Cinema and Columbia College, Chicago. Gottlieb also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Antioch University.
Gottlieb essentially has more teaching credits than movie credits, but academic does not equal comedic. It feels like Gottlieb understands humor as a tool to employ in a three-act structure, rather than something to laugh at.
All the jokes in Just One of the Guys have potential energy, but they rarely crest the hill into kinetic. Performances, blocking and editing don’t nudge them over the top either.
Just One Of The Guys And Dolls
Just One of the Guys is about a girl who pretends to be a high school boy. What are the standard high school movie experiences for a boy?
Standing up to a bully, laughing with friends, sports, drinking beer, balancing schoolwork with goofing off, getting a car, having a nerdy interest, jock straps, pranks and trying to woo a girl, either via date or attending a dance.
The movie should be about a girl going through those experiences as a boy and the clash that her female perspective brings to those events.
Just One of the Guys certainly hits some of those benchmarks, but it never hits them with any real fish-out-of-water determination.
For example, the main character finds themselves in a boys’ locker room, but to the movie, that’s the joke.
Haha! A girl is in a boys’ locker room!
At another point, the main character goes to a boy’s bathroom. To the movie, that’s the joke.
Haha! A girl is in a boy’s bathroom!
Those are not jokes. Those are containers for jokes. Something must put inside them, wrapped up with a bow and presented to the audience.
Just One Of The Guy Pearce
Just One of the Guys is a movie that always needs to go one step further with its jokes. The opportunities are there and should write themselves.
For example, what if the guys in the locker room decide the main character is the target of the day for a wedgie, and they grab a handful of lacy panties instead of jockeys?
Or, how about a scene where the main character tries to figure out how to transfer everything from her purse to a wallet?
Also, don’t be afraid to go full stupid:
“Hey, new guy, what’s this string hanging out of your pocket? What the heck! It’s a tampon! Why are you carrying tampons!”
“Uhm…you can smoke them. We did it all the time at my last school…”
Cut to the main character using peer pressure to her advantage with a group of guys out behind the school, all smoking tampons like the morons that teenage boys are…
Just Cause One Of The Guys
Just One of the Guys unfairly makes one performer shoulder the bulk of its humor: Billy Jacoby (Beastmaster). He plays the oversexed little brother and delivers an endless litany of lame wisecracking that is basically a teenage boy minstrel show.
The joke is absolutely run into the ground. Every time Jacoby’s character is onscreen, you hope he slips and breaks a leg and that there is a nearby barn to take him behind.
The rest of the performers are not given much else to work with either.
Clayton Rohner (The Relic) is the main character’s love interest. Why? The screenplay writes him that way. Some Shakespearean tomfoolery happens, where the main character tries to find him a date and discovers she wants to date him herself, but that journey is not challenging enough to truly bond them.
Likewise, the usually fun William Zabka does his bully schtick, but he never comes off as a real villain. He is simply a kind of sad character who likes to lift tables.
Deborah Goodrich (April Fool’s Day) is Clayton’s dream girl. Why? The screenplay writes her that way. Nothing about her character holds appeal.
Gottlieb does not seem to understand what makes a teenage guy ache for a particular girl. It’s not because the girl simply exists. It’s because she represents a quest.
The rest of the cast is there to make the school appear to be a real world. A disconcertingly young Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks) has a couple of scenes. Toni Hudson (Texas Chainsaw Massacre III) is solid but underused as the best friend. Plus, character actors Stuart Charno (Friday the 13th 2) and Arye Gross (Soul Man) appear as nerds. Why? Because nerds are funny in other movies.
It’s academic!
Just One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest Of The Guys
Just One of the Guys understands what elements a comedy contains, but it doesn’t know how to properly use them. Yet, as a teen film, it works okay. Joyce Hyser plays the main character, and she is quite good.
Hyster has a captivating aspect as a woman that carried over to real life. She netted Bruce Springsteen and Warren Beatty. This charisma serves her well in the film. With short hair and no makeup, Hyster is easily as pretty as Fight Club Jared Leto. Her male persona is over-the-top New York jocular, but the exaggerated performance masks her female traits well.
It is surprising Hyser did not have a bigger career. She is a cross between Anne Hathaway and Gal Godot. Yet, her biggest credit after Just One of the Guys was the Kirk Douglas comedy Greedy (1994).
Despite being highly watchable, Hyser is not helped by the storyline. The reason she pretends to be a boy is because no one liked her student newspaper article. Her theory is that if she was a boy, her article would have been praised. So, she becomes a boy, and then the movie completely ignores the newspaper plotline for the rest of its runtime, until a tacked-on denouement.
That is a terrible storyline. Who cares about the apparent rampant sexism in high school newspapers?
A superior storyline would be a disillusioned Hyser pretends to be a boy because she believes boys have the easier high school experience after getting dumped by her boyfriend. She then learns differently when she befriends Rohner’s character. His sensitivity and personality make high school a terrible place for him. Hyser learns that boys and girls both have struggles. Maybe her and Rohner get together in the end. Maybe they don’t. But they both grew through the the humorous adventure.
It doesn’t take a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Antioch University to know this is the better direction.
He’s Just Not One Of The Guys Into You
Just One of the Guys is interesting as an artifact of the 1980s. Supposedly, it is held in some regard today by gay and transgender women. This is a questionable claim, especially considering that the main character’s journey ends with her rejecting her masculine identity and declaring her womanhood in the most obvious of ways: by showing her boobs to a man.
Overall, it’s a good effort at a teen film, but it fails as a comedy film, and as a film trying to address sexism. Like the crossdressing character of the movie, Just One of the Guys tries to dress up as a smart when it should have just been itself…
