In a perfect world, I'd never write another piece "reclaiming" a movie on its 10th, 15th, 20th, whatever anniversary. Not because I don't enjoy shouting my pop culture opinions at the internet—that's actually the only way I can feel joy—but because it's more of a bummer than you'd think to chart the exact reasons a movie didn't receive the accolades it deserved in its time. Something I think about a lot: The combination of pride and low-key frustration in Karyn Kusama's voice at a 2019 post-screening Q&A for the unfairly-maligned Jennifer's Body when she said, "What’s really gratifying about people coming back to the film...is it’s being revisited because it’s really fucking good." Something more recent I think about a lot is a tweet from New York Magazine's Matt Zoller Seitz—it's 2021, we can cite tweets—that reads, "Extravagant, silly, pointless, stupid, random, 'what the fuck' entertainment is the kind that should be praised when it appears, not 'discovered' or 'reclaimed' in a thinkpiece 20 years later."

This is all to say, Josie and the Pussycats turns 20 this month, and here we go reclaimin' again. Josie and the Pussycats shouldn't need it. This movie was a brilliant gem in 2001 and, like all gems, it remains unblemished in 2021, unchanged by the two decades in between. Du jour means pop culture just straight-up got it wrong. Du jour means we blew it.

Josie and the Pussycats
Image via Universal

It's baffling to watch this wonderfully clever punk-rock comedy and know that it ker-plopped its way into theaters with $14 million worldwide on a $39 million budget. The critical reaction can be accurately described as "Abraham Van Helsing brandishing a crucifix at a vampire." ("Josie and the Pussycats are not dumber than the Spice Girls, but they're as dumb as the Spice Girls, which is dumb enough," is how Roger Ebert, the GOAT, began his half-star savagery.) Written and directed by Can't Hardly Wait duo Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan—and based on the characters from both Archie Comics and their own Hanna-Barbera cartoon—Josie stars Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid as the titular trio, as their swept up into a devious subliminal messaging conspiracy orchestrated by promoter Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming, brilliant) and MegaRecords CEO Fiona (Parker Posey, brilliant). The whole thing is presented with a level of bubble-gum glam that couldn't be contained by 10 million Sam Goodies; the aesthetic of Josie and the Pussycats is comparable to taking ecstasy and walking on to the set of Total Request Live. (Yes, TRL host Carson Daly does appear in this film to deliver what I consider the peak of comedic dialogue: "This isn’t Total Request Live. It’s more like Total Request Dead.”)

RELATED: Rachael Leigh Cook Discusses Going to “Movie Jail” for ‘Josie and the Pussycats’

Put a little blunter, Josie and the Pussycats is operating with a dumb-as-rocks surface, but it's all purposeful. The barrage of product placement—Reid showering in a bathroom sponsored by McDonald's is a highlight—is the point, a meta-gag for the "subtle" ways the music industry turns tunes into product. The screaming boy band fans blocking roads with The Beatles era-ish frenzy; the ease with which labels replaced one identical act with another; the ways in which pop stars are less person than template. It's all there, turned to 11, in Josie and the Pussycats, a satire wrapped in a bedazzled Austin Powers shell, and if the general audience missed that at the time, it might be because Josie debuted smack-dab in the middle of what it was satirizing. Just two years earlier, Britney Spears rocketed into music video mega-stardom on the backs of "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!...I Did It Again." Less than a year before Josie hit theaters, NSYNC sold more than two million copies of "No Strings Attached" in a single dang week. The Jonas Brothers were still being assembled in a basement laboratory beneath Disney's Epcot Center.  It's easy to say a movie was ahead of its time, but the sobs of frenzied fans were still too loud to hear what Josie and the Pussycats was trying to do. It makes sense that the film needed hindsight to fully appreciate; in a way, re-assessing this movie hits the same, sad way as watching Framing Britney Spears in 2021.

Parker Posey in Josie and the Pussycats
Image via Universal

That's a lot to put on a silly musical comedy that opens with a song called "Back Door Lover." Let's be clear, in addition to being a fiendishly clever satire ahead of its time, Josie and the Pussycats is just good. It's just really, really good, an unabashedly feel-good gag-a-minute romp in which the power of pure friendship saves the day. The meta of this movie isn't just in its messaging; Elfont and Kaplan's script breaks the fourth wall with abandon. (“I’m here because I’m in the comic book," Missi Pyle's Alexandra Cabot says at one point.) And if you truly buy nothing this movie is selling, you could just watch it with your eyes closed, because the soundtrack totally, absolutely rips to this very day. With 12-time Grammy winner Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds onboard as executive producer of the film's music and Josie's vocals provided by Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo—who you might also recognize jamming on the roof of a high school in 10 Things I Hate About YouJosie and the Pussycat's soundtrack kickstarted its cult status. As it raked in peanuts at the box office, the soundtrack was certified gold.

Lest you believe selling a razor-sharp comedy peppered with genuine pop-punk gems is an easy task, please watch this deeply unfortunate trailer, which really has the Movie Voiceover Guy say the words "Nobody believed in them, but they believed in themselves."

"We were in this world where we were only focused on the movie and this world and the jokes we were laughing at on set, and then they showed us the marketing materials and it was like, 'Oh shit, they're going to sell this movie to 10-year-old girls,'" Elfont said in a 2017 retrospective. "They're not going to sell it to the people who are going to understand this movie, and the people they're selling it to aren't going to get it. And that's kind of what happened."

Josie and the Pussycats
Image via Universal

But now, even further into the future, can you really just blame the marketing? As is the case with most unappreciated gems, it's more a whirlwind of unfortunateness. It's marketing, yeah, but it's also just the whims of a fickle audience. It's timing. And you can never, ever rule out good old-fashioned sexism when it comes to the complete and total rejection of a female-fronted film. (That last one is pretty evergreen across the board, honestly.) In the end, the many factors matter less than the fact a perfectly-built boat sank like the Titanic.

"It took us out of the movie industry," Kaplan said in the same retrospective, and that's the real meat of the matter. It's a beautiful thing when a movie gains an audience over time, because that doesn't always happen. Some gems just stay buried. But Josie and the Pussycats is such an infuriating whiff on our part that you want to hold it up as the standard; you want to point toward this deeply goofy comedy and say "appreciate this shit when it matters, you dolts, you buffoons." We'll keep doing retrospectives, keep "reclaiming" unappreciated films of the past, but never forget the main reason. To borrow a phrase, these movies are just really fucking good.

KEEP READING: Watch The Cast of ‘Josie and the Pussycats’ Reunite for the Film’s 20th Anniversary