Jessica Williams is the 27-year-old actor and comedian who has guested on HBO’s Girls, been the youngest correspondent on The Daily Show and now co-hosts a hugely admired comedy podcast: 2 Dope Queens with Phoebe Robinson. Now comes this Netflix feature showcase for her as both star and executive producer – written and directed by Jim Strouse, who with Jemaine Clement co-created the 2015 comedy People Places Things, in which Williams had a role.
It has to be said that this is a pretty underwhelming, very conventional romcom vehicle for Williams, who plays a single woman in Brooklyn who is funny, smart, vulnerable, etc, etc. She is getting over a breakup, finding real – if intermittent – fulfilment in teaching theatre to kids, but agonising about her dream of being a dramatist, and obsessing about the guy she broke up with, the sleepily cool Damon, played by Lakeith Stanfield. Her character’s name is changed to Jessica James, maybe because of the badass resemblance to outlaw Jesse James. As the lead, Jessica has undoubtedly stylishness and charisma, but she is often a bit cold and ungenerous, and is marooned in a movie that often just isn’t all that funny.
Jessica goes on a date – a real date, set up by a friend, not a Tinder date, which is shorthand for everything superficial and hilariously meaningless – and she finds herself seated opposite an older Irish guy named Boone, played by Chris O’Dowd, who since Bridesmaids has perhaps become the go-to guy for unthreatening yet sexily rumpled romantic realness. Boone has supposedly got rich from designing an app that generates automatic messages to your loved ones through monitoring their news on social media. It is a script idea that is neither funny nor convincing.
Jessica and Boone kind of hit it off, in a quirky and self-aware way, but it is awkward and tricky because of their respective ex-partners. Boone is divorced from an award-winning food photographer.
Jessica suggests they neutralise their obsessions by unfollowing their exes on Instagram and getting each other to follow them instead, just reporting any relevant news, a kind of Strangers on a Train approach that is actually quite funny. Jessica also journeys home to Ohio for her sister’s baby shower, included in the film to show her sister’s conservatism and her folks’ heartbreakingly lovable affection and support for her life choices.
And so the movie trundles on, with Jessica making a breakthrough with her teaching and her relationship with Boone progressing. She even gets a career opportunity that is not very different from Mariel Hemingway’s at the end of Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
The Incredible Jessica James is easygoing and amiable, a trad romcom-lite, but with nothing much in the way of material and nothing like as relaxed and funny as Williams’ podcast 2 Dope Queens.