OVERVIEW
The stoner comedy is back! This time with Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat, and.. strange superpowers? Stewart and Shawkat play Frankie and Molly, roommates with rent due, no money to pay it, and considerably more interest in getting high than in figuring out what comes next. After Frankie is mistaken for a scientist who looks just like her, she is handed a suitcase holding an experimental drug that lets the two friends read each other’s minds. Both the agency that developed it and the people it was meant for come looking for the suitcase.
BACKGROUND
Dylan Meyer, Stewart’s wife, wrote The Wrong Girls more than a decade ago, one of her first scripts, based on her time living with her best friend Maggie McLean when both were in their mid-twenties, working odd jobs. The project found funding and lost it several times while Meyer built a screenwriting career that included work with HBO, Bad Robot, and Amy Poehler’s Moxie. Meyer, McLean, and Stewart eventually formed Nevermind Pictures, in part to keep McLean free to produce their films. For Stewart, The Wrong Girls also offered a return to stoner comedy after a decade of increasingly serious work in front of and behind the camera, as she was completing her feature directorial debut, The Chronology of Water. Her last real venture into the genre was American Ultra in 2015.
THE REVIEW
It is the kind of film that rides almost entirely on the chemistry of its two central performers, and thankfully, Stewart and Shawkat convince as friends who would do absolutely anything for each other. They are incredibly fun to watch, whether they are communicating through looks and grunts, getting high, bickering, or talking about their frustrations. There is an immediate familiarity to their banter that makes their friendship feel warm and affectionate, giving the film an unexpected sweetness underneath all the stupidity.
Stewart, who has certainly played silly before, most notably in Charlie’s Angels, has rarely seemed this loose or, frankly, this comfortable. Her body language is more exaggerated than usual, her expressions bigger, and she turns her usually naturally awkward rhythms into a character trait of someone who is only truly comfortable when Molly is around. Her comic timing is also surprisingly precise, such as in her first interactions with LaKeith Stanfield. Shawkat plays well against her, louder and broader, but also as the one whose life has some semblance of stability and needs to play the big sister. Molly has a boyfriend, a way of making money, and at least some idea of how to function as an adult, yet she remains tied to Frankie by affection and a sense of responsibility. You can see where their eventual misunderstandings are heading, but when they arrive, it feels like it came from an authentic place.
The decision to give them superpowers and throw them into a conspiracy involving government agents and sketchy organizations is mildly amusing, though the film rarely finds anything particularly original to do with it. Chases, secret organizations, and escalating misunderstandings give the film somewhere to go, but don’t truly excite. There are chuckles when Frankie and Molly discover they can hear their cat’s thoughts, and another bit has them using their powers to make a group of goons dance, but these ideas never reach the inspired absurdity of the best stoner comedies. The Wrong Girls is much funnier when Meyer simply lets Frankie and Molly be Frankie and Molly. One of the best gags has them enthusiastically dancing to a Céline Dion classic, only for the film to cut to another character’s perspective.
The supporting cast gets its share of laughs, although seeing LaKeith Stanfield play another variation of a mysterious figure is beginning to feel overly familiar. Kate McKinnon is better in her deeply improvised cameo.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall, The Wrong Girls is not a perfect movie, and perhaps not a particularly great one either. It is easy to roll your eyes once the government chases you and misunderstandings begin to pile up, especially in its commitment to follow the plot exactly as you expect it to go. Yet the center feels genuinely refreshing. Whereas Ethan Coen’s recent “comedies” such as Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t! struggled to find much personality in placing women inside genres historically dominated by men, and Meyer has a better handle on how to use that perspective to breathe some life into a very familiar formula. Frankie and Molly are occasionally infuriating people, but with Stewart and Shawkat playing them, they are still a pleasure to spend time with. And that is all a stoner comedy really needs.