A delightful marshmallow of a movie, with Viwanathan giving her all in a star making turn; she, and a the script which is consistently light and clever but manages to not fall into being stupid ... While also still having some predictable beats and yet balancing it all with some joy and aplomb and making me for the first time in many months wish more than anything I could do karaoke with friends again, is what makes this work. She has such a warm and expressive face (those eyebrows are as crucial to her star power as like Rita Hayworth's hair), but she's a good actress too.
So the key components of this fly enough as a rom com that I can mostly (if not completely) look over two things: much of the soundtrack, with a few exceptions (ie that Billie Eilish song) are unimpressive commercial nonsense, and the performance by Dacre Montgomery didn't click for me. He might be fine in other movies, and he doesn't give an outright bad performance, but he is largely one note for like 75% of this as the "Im too cool for you" dude with it all, and more importantly I didn't buy much in the way of chemistry here with Viswanathan - if anything he comes off like a more steely-eyed and sometimes uncomfortable discount Zac Efron, though I can get why the ladies will find him attractive enough and the director casting him - and that is crippling to this, especially at the end when things have to come to a romantic head (that's not a spoiler, that's just convention).
I dont know how many will go see this in theaters, where it is right now, but come video this will be a swell and often pretty funny addition to any sensible couple's genre rotation (I had one big laugh and I won't say exactly what but it involved an ex president and that's all I will say, and how can you not smile when right after a breakup the bff-roommates swadle the main character and put a dvd of Eternal Sunshine in her arms). I hope we get more from this filmmaker.
