They Don’t Make Comedies Like One of Them Days Anymore

Is pot becoming too passé for comedy? The thought occurred to me while watching One of Them Days, a likable buddy movie that has the exact contours and shaggy charm of a stoner comedy without ever getting around to partaking. Like Craig and Smokey, Jesse and Chester, and Harold and Kumar before them, Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) are a pair of genial underdogs with a seemingly straightforward task — scraping together $1,500 for rent by the end of the day — that becomes an excuse for an outrageous set of adventures. It’s not that the longtime roommates and besties seem like they’d be opposed to kicking back in the company of Mary Jane, but between Dreux’s anxiety over an upcoming job interview; Alyssa’s freeloading boyfriend, Keshawn (Joshua David Neal); and the nine hours they have to avoid eviction, the pair just don’t have the luxury of getting high. Also, the mild disreputability of weed is gone, at least in California, where it has been legal for nearly a decade, sold in Apple Store–style emporiums to overwhelmed moms in search of sleep aids and wellness bros looking to microdose. Like the crumbling Baldwin Village apartment complex Dreux and Alyssa live in, weed is getting gentrified, and the characters don’t need it as common ground. Their bond is based on other things, like shared history, affection, and a deep familiarity with economic insecurity.

Rather than reveling in slackerdom, the characters in One of Them Days are desperate to get just the slightest bit ahead and escape the paycheck-to-paycheck grind, a possibility that keeps eluding them despite Dreux’s plans and Alyssa’s manifesting. It’s a testament to the film, which was written by Rap Sh!t showrunner Syreeta Singleton and directed by Lawrence Lamont, that it’s able to balance the exhaustion its characters feel with the goofiness of the episodes they find themselves in. Really, it’s a testament to the cast, an absurd parade of funny people ranging from comedians like Katt Williams and Lil Rel Howery to relative newcomers like Aziza Scott, who steals the show as local villainess Berniece. As Alyssa, an artist who falls somewhere between free spirit and flake, SZA eases into her first acting role like someone who has been doing this all along. With her voluptuous form and mermaid mane, she looks like a doodle of sensual satisfaction when Dreux exasperatedly finds her sprawled in bed, having ended up there with Keshawn when she was supposed to be talking to him about moving out. And as the striver Dreux, who has been waiting tables during the night shift at Norms after failing to finish her business degree, Palmer makes good use of a charisma that could power whole city blocks.

Honestly, watching One of Them Days, you start to wonder why Palmer isn’t one of the biggest stars in the world by now, though part of the problem is that she’s a creature of comedy, and studios barely make them anymore. Even when the writing and pacing falls slack in this one, as it definitely does on occasion, she wrings laughs out of scenes with screwball physicality and surprising line readings. She makes hay out of a gasped-out “He knew how to clean this whole time!” when discovering that Keshawn has absconded with his sneaker collection and what was meant to be their rent money. She turns a run-in with her crush, Maniac (Patrick Cage), in her neighbor’s unofficial corner store into a masterfully choreographed bit of lustful awkwardness. Dreux and Alyssa have what looks like a familiar dynamic: Dreux the uptight one in search of control, Alyssa the loosey-goosey one urging her friend to worry less. When the film begins, it invites you to wonder whether Alyssa, whose poor choices range from being dickmatized enough to trust Keshawn with rent to taking a pair of power-line sneakers belonging to a local gangster, is holding Dreux back. But by the end, Alyssa’s woo-woo outlook seems as reasonable as Dreux’s more traditional attempts to get ahead, when the game is so rigged that every wrong move seems to incur a lifetime penalty.

Among the stops on Dreux and Alyssa’s journey are a blood bank where a stripper turned nurse played by Janelle James lets an increasingly gray Dreux donate extra pints and a payday-loan place that touts a 1,900.5 percent APR rate. But the key location is the apartment complex, which may be run by a hard-ass landlord named Uche (Rizi Timane) with no patience for due process, and which may shed chunks of ceiling plaster whenever a door gets slammed, but which is home to a long-term community the movie treats with wry affection. When the place gets its inaugural white girl, Bethany, played with perky obliviousness by Maude Apatow, the residents gather to take in her sweet smile and reactive rescue dog with the resignation of people who are well aware that she represents the beginning of the end. She may not be the enemy herself, but she comes from a plane of existence where everyone has a laptop job, their rental units have already been renovated, and no one laughs in their face upon the sight of their credit score, the way a loan admin played by the excellent Keyla Monterroso Mejia does upon pulling up Dreux’s. Dreux and Alyssa, on the other hand, have to extract their happy ending by facing possible death. They get it, of course. This is the kind of comedy that wants its scrappy heroes, stoned or not, to succeed — though when Dreux and Alyssa do, they opt to celebrate with a cocktail.