The romantic comedy, loosely based on her real-life experiences as well as the standup routine that’s innovatively integrated throughout, is centered on a woman who begrudgingly decides to let down her guard when it comes to relationships, only to be confronted with a problematic guy who’s more slippery than safe.
He seems to be a good guy, keeping up with her hectic schedule, meeting up with her at all hours and helping her achieve her acting ambitions.
There’s a spiraling, outlandish absurdity to Dennis’ manipulative fibs, like seeing him weasel his way off a golf course after professing he was on an Ivy league team, or get out of arranging an introduction between Andrea and his allegedly cancer-stricken mother at his Beverly Hills home.
The sharp-tongued comic is in full control of the spotlight, whether it’s performing her live routine spliced into the fictionalized portraiture, or engaging in cinematic catharsis as the leading lady in her own narrative.
While the film offers enlightened commentary on the insidious nature of the lies we tell ourselves and others, its makers deliver a heartening sense of sisterhood without dipping into any cloying or overt sentimentality.
Despite demonstrating ingenuity when it comes to flipping the script on tropes and genre trappings, a few sequences might have presented better as ideas in an outline than they do in execution.
Since audiences don’t typically expect to walk away learning any lessons from a light-hearted romp such as this, it’s an unexpected life-enhancement that we actually do.