Ten years ago, the screenwriter Audrey Shulman whipped up a wacky plan to land a boyfriend: She’d barhop using a homemade cake as bait. “The cake was magic because it made me a magnet,” Shulman blo…
and Odessa A’zion as twentysomething best friends who chart a mission to bring dessert to every male demographic in Los Angeles. Using criss-crossing lines of red string, they target tech bros, cowboys and ironic hipsters across a pinned-up city map.
Jane — as in plain — is a rarely-been-kissed mailroom clerk who wears oversized cardigans and ducks out of parties to go home alone and listen to NPR. “If it works for Mr. Rogers, it works for me,” she quips. Jane’s the most cartoonish example of that old “she’s gorgeous but doesn’t know it” trope that I’ve seen in a while, and even within the logic of the movie, Shahidi is lit and styled so adoringly that you can’t buy that her character is floundering for a date.
So it’s lucky that A’zion, as the cancer-stricken friend, pulls our attention away from that plotline until we practically forget the film claims to care about baked goods. Her character, Corrine, is bold and sparkly, the kind of showboat who leaps atop a bar to belt Wham! Where Jane feels thinly sketched in pastels, Corrine’s portrait has been detailed in bright permanent markers. A’zion roils with emotions and her character is funny, mercurial, reactive and real.
One senses that, even today, Shulman would prefer to cede the spotlight to her roommate. She’d rather gush about her vibrant friend than share much about her own onscreen counterpart, who is kind and devoted and that’s pretty much it. You can’t buy the pair as the childhood friends they’re written to be — surely personalities this opposite would have drifted apart by college.
Other bright spots include Tracy Dishman’s production design and supporting turns from Martha Kelly and Ron Livingston and as Corrine’s shellshocked parents. Kelly makes great use of the comic monotone that stole a scene from Adam Driver in “Marriage Story,” while Livingston, playing a car mechanic, restlessly roams the corners of the film, fixing everything that his character can fix in order to feel less helpless about his daughter’s disease.
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