When music stars enter the movie world, it sometimes serves as a reality check. In the flamboyant video for her 2022 hit song “Kill Bill”, R&B star SZA was a motorbike-riding, sword-wielding woman on a mission. Now, making her big-screen debut in female buddy comedy One of Them Days, she’s just a Los Angeles resident desperate to pay the rent.
The setting is Baldwin Village, an LA neighbourhood known as “the Jungles”. SZA is Alyssa, flatmate of Dreux (pronounced “Drew”), played by Keke Palmer, star of Hustlers and Nope. Their hard-nosed African landlord thinks nothing of summarily evicting tenants in arrears — and now Alyssa’s feckless beau has squandered their rent money. To avoid disaster, the women must face ordeals including electric shocks, a blood bank bloodbath, face-offs with Alyssa’s fearsome love rival Berniece (Aziza Scott) and the embarrassment of swapping their own clothes for some luridly unflattering leisurewear.
Written by Syreeta Singleton, the film is ostensibly a generic race-against-time comedy, but it also goes the extra mile. For starters, this is an affecting but entirely unsentimental study of mismatched friendship. Palmer plays Dreux, the serious one with ambitions, as anxious, incredulous but lucidly tenacious, while Alyssa, wide-eyed and wild-haired, is the directionless dreamer. SZA is the flashier, goofier performer, her delivery echoing the rhythmic looseness of her musical style, but she and Palmer click perfectly, Lawrence Lamont’s direction highlighting the propulsive zip of their exchanges.
In addition, there’s a gallery of vivid supporting characters, broad but not cartoonish, including Katt Williams as a homeless local prophet; Maude Apatow as a relentlessly perky new white neighbour; and, altogether stealing the show, recent Curb Your Enthusiasm regular Keyla Monterroso Mejia as an ostentatiously contemptuous loans officer. Debut feature director Lamont uses mundane locations to good effect, with visual dashes of neon brightness to evoke the most sweatily exhausting of LA summer days.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from March 7 and in US cinemas now
