Joining the pantheon of mediocre “How To” movies (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, How to Deal, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People), we now have How to Be Single, the latest post-Sex and the City romp that teaches nothing of the such. Instead of portraying what it’s like to be single in New York with any iota of realism, How to Be delivers more of the same impeccably cute apartments, eligible men and well-lit party scenes we seen before. Produced by Flower Films, Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen’s company that also gave us 50 First Dates, Fever Pitch and Whip It!, the unrelenting cuteness comes as no surprise. And yet, for all its unapologetic regurgitation of tropes, pop songs and pretty scenery, How to Be Single is kind of funny.
Fresh from her sexual awakening in last year’s Fifty Shades of Grey, Dakota Johnson returns to her wide-eyed ingénue roots. This time, she’s Alice—a nice girl who just graduated from a nice college and has decided to break up with her nice boyfriend. Josh (Nicholas Braun) has been a loyal companion for years, but the time has come for a break. She’s moving to the big city and she needs to step outside her comfort zone and figure out—get ready for it—how to be alone.
Alice moves in with her sister Meg (Leslie Mann), a successful, single doctor who clings to the notion that she doesn’t need a man or a baby to make her happy. She’s a sort of family-friendly feminist who says she doesn’t like babies and then decides to get in vitro fertilization the minute she sees one at the hospital. Meg would be an intolerable character if it weren’t for Mann, whose every word is somehow funny and charming.
Alice finds a great job overnight at an office that looks like an old set from The Apprentice. On her first day of work, which apparently requires doing nothing, she befriends Robin (Rebel Wilson), a lewd, lovably surreal alcoholic who refuses to let Alice go home without getting wasted and making out with a stranger. They go to a club, hit on some guys and wake up the next day with a joint in their hair. It’s a stupid scene made watchable by Wilson’s rapid-fire jokes and the pleasant-enough screen presence of Johnson, who’s like a girl from an Old Navy commercial that just discovered birth control.
While Robin’s character goes entirely undeveloped (she’s the one-dimensional sidekick) we also get the likable yet totally random Lucy (Alison Brie). She’s lives in a gorgeous apartment in the Meatpacking District and instead of having a real job or real friends, she spends every day looking at online dating sites. Forced to use the Wi-Fi at the bar downstairs, she meets playboy bartender Tom (Anders Holm), a combination of Matthew McConaughey and every guy in college you hated. They start up a love-hate banter that gradually exposes Tom’s (aw) heart of gold.
Did I mention Damon Wayans Jr. in this? I have no idea why. You’ll have to see it for yourself and maybe we can collectively mourn the lack of humor afforded to his role. He’s a wealthy widower with a daughter who plays prince to Alice’s awkward Cinderella soul. He’s given an unnecessarily sentimental backstory pointing toward the canned, over-writing that takes places in too many modern romantic comedies. Writers Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn also wrote Never Been Kissed, one of the great high school comedies of the ‘90s but followed it with films like He’s Just Not That into You and The Vow. They’ve conformed to the pressures of a placid mainstream and How to Be follows that silly-sappy paradigm.
For all its tired archetypes and plot devices, there is a joy to be had in watching Rebel Wilson climb headfirst out of a cab window; in Alison Brie cutting panty-hose with child-safety scissors; in Leslie Mann throwing a baby chair. The women of How to Be aren’t about to usher in a feminist revolution, but they do elevate a dull script into something vaguely improvised and moderately funny. It doesn’t have the zaniness of Bridesmaids or the raunchiness of Trainwreck but it’s a fine addition to the canon of stories about pretty white women in New York who are somehow always on the verge of discovering themselves.