‘One of Them Days’ Review: Keke Palmer and SZA in a Fast-Talking Day-in-the-Life-of-the-Hood Comedy Made With a ’90s Verve
“One of Them Days,” starring Keke Palmer and SZA as fast-talking, flat-broke Los Angeles roommates who have nine hours to come up with the rent money, is a winning throwback to the kind of day-in-the-hood comedy they used to make in the ’90s — movies like “Friday” (1995) and “The Players Club” (1998), which squeezed just enough texture in between the laughs to qualify as crowd-pleasing slices of life. These movies, usually produced by New Line, were the descendants of “House Party” and Spike Lee (notably the exuberant opening 45 minutes of “Do the Right Thing”), though they were also a counterreaction to the dramas of inner-city violence that had dominated commercial Black cinema during the first half of the ’90s. To that genre, they offered a counterbalance of raunchy, scuzzy corkscrew humanity, teaching the movie industry a lesson — about the place where diversity meets commerce — that it seems to need to keep learning over and over again.
In “One of Them Days,” Dreux (Palmer), who works as a waitress in a franchise restaurant, and Alyssa (SZA), an artist who does as little as possible, are like a comedy team who operate on advanced levels of verbal velocity. They shoot out insults and righteous cheerleading with equal rancorous glee; the screenplay, by Syreeta Singleton, has a screwball recklessness that it wears lightly on its sleeve. The two need the rent money because their landlord, the dour immigrant Uche (Rizi Timane), is cracking down on the tenants of their dilapidated two-story apartment complex. The place is a pit, but gentrification is in the air, and so are eviction notices. Alyssa, unfortunately, gave the money to her sort-of boyfriend, the jittery scrub Keshawn (Joshua David Neal), who’s full of schemes even though he doesn’t appear to have a home. He spent the money on his latest hustle — ugly acrylic T-shirts that say “Gucci.”
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The how-will-they-get-the-money? plot, punctuated by a countdown clock that periodically stops the action, catapults our heroines from one situation to the next, but the real subject of “One of Them Days” is simply the people they keep meeting. The movie is a likably bent portrait of a community whose residents revel in their energized dysfunction, which is never so cartoonish that it can’t inspire an honest laugh.
Dreux and Alyssa walk into a loan office where Lucky (Katt Williams), the homeless philosopher outside, keeps badgering them through the window, saying “don’t do it” — and the joke is how right he is. The former stripper (Janelle James) who presides with utilitarian sternness over the blood bank; the thief on a bike who keeps dashing past a fast-food pay window to purse-snatch honey butter biscuits; the big-booty-shaking troublemaker (Aziza Scott) who has hijacked Keshawn’s loyalty, if not his heart; the vintage Air Jordans hanging from a power line that Alyssa retrieves as if they were gold bars (their market value is $2,500); her subsequent encounter with an EMS van after the power line nearly electrocutes her — it all adds up to stylized portrait of low-rent American desperation.
There is romance: Dreux’s flirtation with the Mercedes-driving Maniac (Patrick Cage), a dreamboat former delinquent she is certain must now be some sort of criminal. There’s a con artist, played with changeup cleverness by Lil Rel Howry, who buys the Air Jordans, and there’s a hilariously merciless drone-voiced gangster, King Lolo (Amin Joseph), who demonstrates that total of lack of empathy is already a parody of itself. And there is our heroines’ ongoing effort, as they race through this maelstrom of casual insanity, to keep their heads above it all.
Dreux has an interview, scheduled for late in the afternoon, that could land her a job as a franchise manager — her shot to hoist her life into a new strata. Palmer, though she has the “straight” role, is so witty in her attack that she commands the screen. And SZA, in her film debut, simply sizzles. She’s a volcano of camp fury. The director, Lawrence Lamont, is a helmer of hip-hop videos making his feature-film directing debut, and while it might seem his main task is to keep the comedy crackling, the film’s secret weapon is the visual and rhythmic flow he imparts to it. Each encounter feels just random enough to establish its own comic space. “One of Them Days” has its finger on the pulse of a society that, for too many, is an economic bottomless pit. In the movie, the pain of that is real, but the joke of it is that it has turned everyone into a walking ostentatious coping mechanism. That’s what makes them tasty company.
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