Culture

“Someone Great,” the Rom-Com That’s Really an Ode to Female Friendship


My ex-fiancé and I broke up on the stoop of our Baltimore City apartment on the night of Super Bowl XLVII, in 2013, just as the game clock ran out and the city around us burst into joy. (The Ravens won.) Though that night marked a turning point in my life, the only vivid memory I have of it is the sound of my friend Jillian’s shoes slapping against the pavement as she ran down the street and into my arms. And yet the story of that summer is not a sad one. It ended with me crashing with my friends for a few months of dancing and drinking, and then moving to New York City for graduate school. If that summer had been made into a movie, it would look somewhat like the Netflix film “Someone Great.”

“Someone Great,” which was written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and inspired, in part, by her own heartbreak, starts where most romantic comedies end—after the guy gets the girl. The movie kicks off with a montage of a relationship, set gloriously to Lorde’s “Supercut.” Nine years later, the girl, Jenny Young (Gina Rodriguez), lands her dream job, at Rolling Stone in San Francisco. The guy, Nate Davis (Lakeith Stanfield), breaks up with her because he doesn’t want to be in a long-distance relationship. Then the movie really begins, with Jenny’s friends Erin Kennedy (DeWanda Wise) and Blair Helms (Brittany Snow) rallying around her.

Over the next day, Jenny tries to bury her pain by running all over New York City with her friends, trying to get tickets to the Neon Classic, a music festival, and doing some marijuana and molly along the way. These scenes are interlaced with flashbacks that give us more insight into Jenny and Nate’s relationship. There’s a pantsless dance scene set to Lizzo’s 2017 song “Truth Hurts” (the song popped into the Billboard Hot 100 after the movie came out), an outfit montage, a couple of fights, a few epiphanies, and cameos from RuPaul and Rosario Dawson—all the makings of a fantastic rom-com. But the film is not, in fact, a rom-com. Nor is it a breakup film. It’s about falling out of love, yes, but, mostly, it’s about friendship and not picking a man over your career.

In films of the past, someone like Jenny would be presented as a frigid, career-obsessed woman who could only be happy once she settled for an aimless man. Robinson takes her character—and her character’s ambitions—more seriously. For Jenny, not moving to San Francisco is never an option, just as my move to New York City, for school, never felt like it could be seen as a compromise. Perhaps that’s what draws me to this film: the way I can see both my friendships and myself in it. This is bolstered by the diversity of the cast: Jenny is Latina, Erin and Nate are black, and Blair is white. Even more striking are the two interracial relationships in the movie, neither of which involves a white person—a rarity in Hollywood films. And though some of the characters’ plotlines can, at first, feel trite, that’s partly the point. Robinson is creating stereotypes so that she can break them down. This is why the film succeeds where others, like “Wine Country” and “Rough Night,” fail; it takes us into caricature territory only to yank us out of it. It’s a witty movie that makes me want to cry and dance every time I watch it, the film equivalent of listening to a Robyn song on repeat. Coming from me, there is no stronger recommendation.



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