It’s generally never a good idea, as a romantic comedy, to invoke “When Harry Met Sally” and remind audience members that they could be watching an influential all-time great example of the form instead of one of its many derivatives. But “Sweethearts,” a new Max original, earns its shout-out to the Nora Ephron classic better than most. At the tail end of the Thanksgiving comedy, male lead Ben (Nico Hiraga) sits down with his parents after dinner to watch the 1989 Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan vehicle, only to find the iconic “Men and women can’t be friends” speech hits a bit too close to home.
That’s a question that’s been hanging over his relationship with BFF Jamie (Kiernan Shipka of “Mad Men” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” fame) for a while now. Tight-knit since eighth grade and now attending the same college, the two do practically everything together and have a perfectly rom-com dynamic — he’s mellow and a bit of a pushover, she’s abrasive and headstrong. But the two have (of course) never considered the possibility of being together, a thread that gets steadily teased across their trip back home from school.
When that inevitability finally comes to the forefront in the third act, it’s almost a little too cliché — but, without spoiling it, the way “Sweethearts” approaches the issue proves genuinely surprising and refreshing. It’s a closing swerve that ends the mixed-bag film, an intermittently fun but sometimes underwritten One Night Out story, on a high.
Coming from first-time director Jordan Weiss (best known for the feminist hang-out sitcom “Dollface” and soon to write the script for “Freakier Friday”), “Sweethearts” has a great set-up for an insightful teen film, setting its debauchery and coming-of-age storyline during the classic awkward experience of heading to your hometown the first Thanksgiving break of college to see how your old classmates have changed and show them how you have changed. For Jamie and Ben, the main priority of the pre-holiday Wednesday bar crawl through their sleepy Ohio town isn’t getting hammered, but instead finally cutting off the high school relationships they’ve foolishly stayed in — with doltish football star at Harvard Simon (Charlie Hall) and type-A theater kid Claire (Ava DeMary), respectively.
The two have other issues that have prevented them from thriving at their school, a fictional and culturally vague liberal arts college (it’s stereotypically fratty and party-centric, but also apparently small enough that all the freshmen know and attend the same off-campus rager). Ben has a major study-abroad opportunity he’s somewhat inexplicably gotten in his first semester and is struggling to decide if he should take it. Jamie, who has a massive chip on her shoulder regarding female friendships after a humiliating First Grade incident got her backstabbed by her then-bestie, treats her sweet roommate at an icy remove.
But it’s clear that these first relationships have become heavy albatrosses around the duo’s necks, as they phone-in phone sex, dodge text messages, and miss out on social events for long-distance movie nights. After a particularly humiliating experience at their pre-break party, the two realize they need to make a clean break from the past and make a pact to both do a classic “Turkey Dump” during the holidays.
Despite the inherently emotional premise of learning to let go of your first love, “Sweethearts” is a laid-back and generally pleasant affair; Weiss co-wrote the script with Dan Brier, and it has the same snarky sense of humor of “Dollface,” never particularly reaching laugh-out-loud funny but staying consistently amusing with some sharp bits, including Ben failing to use the driver’s license he swiped from a dead classmate’s locker as a fake ID or Jamie complaining about there only being one Uber driver in their extremely small town. The cinematography by Andrew Wehde is appropriately warm-hued for the season, and the soundtrack has a fun mix of bangers that range from “Cut to the Feeling” by Carly Rae Jepsen to “Girls” by The Dare to “Nothing Can Change This Love” by Sam Cooke (although a Natasha Bedingfield “Unwritten” needle drop feels a touch too basic).
Sometimes, however, the film’s lack of stakes leads to a certain weightlessness. Crucially, there’s very little reason to care about how Simon and Claire will take the break-ups, when both are such unbearably shrill stereotypes. Neither Jamie nor Ben seem to feel particularly concerned or sad their relationships need to end, which might show how much they’ve run their course, but it also means there’s no reflection on what these couples were like before college. That’s information that’d be nice to have, considering how little sense it makes that the spiky Jamie and the dim Simon or the high-strung Claire and the lackadaisical Ben would even speak to each other in high school, much less date seriously enough to keep it going months after graduation.
Maybe there’d be some more background if the film had stronger pacing: the majority of it is taken up by Jamie and Ben’s attempts to even find their significant others in the chaos of pre-Thanksgiving partying, as they get separated by complications and aimlessly search through their hometown’s meager bar scene. That’s fair enough as a comedic premise, but in practice, the movie feels like it’s spinning its wheels for a significant portion of its running time: it takes about halfway into the movie for the two to even make it back home in the first place, which leaves precious little time for the genuinely interesting material about the duo reuniting with high school acquaintances. Then there’s a subplot about Jamie and Ben’s other high school friend Palmer (a very funny Caleb Hearon) connecting with the queer community of his Ohio small town as a newly out gay that could be cute (Joel Kim Booster and Tramell Tillman of “Severance” fame pop up) if it didn’t feel like it wandered out of a completely different, more earnest movie.
What keeps “Sweethearts” enjoyable despite its dips into tedium are Shipka and Hiraga, who both have experience with this type of bawdy straight-to-streaming teen movie (Shipka in “Let It Snow” and Hiraga in “Moxie”) and prove more than capable of taking on leading roles themselves. They’re terrifically funny and winning alone but especially when they’re together, settling easily into the characters’ long friendship and finding a charming contrast between Jamie’s fiery attitude and Ben’s go-with-the-flow approach to life.
The central premise of the friends’ dropping their high school relationships never takes off when the film has so little interest in fleshing those connections out even slightly, but it’s easy to root for the two of them to find happiness. Whatever that happiness will look like for the duo, their funny and supportive connection is certainly enough to prove Harry Burns’ old “Men and women can’t be friends” number dead wrong.
Grade: B-
“Sweethearts” will start streaming on Max on Thursday, November 28.
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