One side plot involves Paige’s best friend Dillon (Tyler Alvarez) and his girlfriend Stacey (Teala Dunn), who are running against each for school president. The film is not without its charms, though.
The only difference is that the love triangle involves three girls instead of the typical heterosexual pairings. Who Paige will end up falling for couldn’t be clearer than if they had put the person’s name in flashing red lights on the screen.
The film, directed by Sammi Cohen and written by Kirsten King and Casey Rackham, features a by-the-numbers story despite featuring multiple gay/queer characters. But instead of being paired with Gabriella as she hoped, the coach has Gabriella’s sister, AJ (Auli’i Cravalho), mentor her instead. That changes when Paige decides on the spur of the moment to try out for the school track team despite being supremely awkward. Paige has long held a crush on her classmate, Gabriella (Isabella Ferreira), although she can barely form a sentence around her. She long ago came out to her ultra-supportive single mother (Megan Mulally), who’s perhaps a bit too supportive, having all sorts of frank sexual discussions with and around Paige. Paige (Rowan Blanchard) is an aspiring high school artist with dreams of going to Cal Arts. The new Hulu film Crush tries to split the difference, with varying degrees of success.
Teen comedies tend to fall in one of two categories: They’re either sweet, relatively wholesome stories about finding oneself or discovering love for the first time, or they’re ones that push the limit when it comes to sex, drugs, alcohol, and other things that teens are not “supposed” to do.