When Harry dumped Sally...
It should be a surprise to exactly zero people who have ever read a sentence of my movie reviews that I love the teen comedy Sweethearts. But I’m not just huffing my own arrested development on this one, people. Sweethearts is good. You’re not going to read positive critic reviews of it because it’s an unabashedly R-rated teen comedy about how teens are horny idiots, and those almost never get good reviews. (Spoiler warning: I’m about to address the film’s ending in more detail than I usually do for new releases, and will continue to do so for the rest of this review.) You’re also not going to read positive fan buzz because it’s a film of expectation subversion: the movie repeatedly defies its happily-ever-after, best-friends-fall-in-love mandate. You can’t even really call it a romcom as it’s been branded. It’s more like “platonicom.” Sweethearts is much more in the lineage of Superbad: a one-crazy-night joke- and shenanigan-machine rather than a romantic story, which is not what you would guess from the marketing. But everyone else is wrong and I am right, and Sweethearts is great. It’s one of the funniest, quippiest comedies of 2024.
Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) and Ben (Nico Hiraga) are college freshmen in their first semester. The two are longtime friends who went to high school together, and both are dating people from their hometown long-distance. To be fair to the skeptics of Sweethearts’ relationship development and ending, the film teases a bit too hard the “unrealistic male and female friendship” Delaney Row has mocked. It does suggest the main purpose of the film is for us to watch them realize they are in love. About a month into college, the pair each decide that their long-distance relationships are making them unhappy and they want to break up with their respective partners, but both are worried that they don’t have the fortitude to follow through on the breakups. Thus, they make a pact to both dump their significant others during a Thanksgiving visit home.
I’ll get a couple of my nagging beefs with Sweethearts out of the way: I don’t think the film builds quite enough story architecture to really sell the idea that both Jamie and Ben have to follow through with their planned breakups during Thanksgiving break. There are a few obvious alternatives like… just do it by video chat? They briefly consider sending breakup texts, then just as quickly decide any split not initiated in person is impossible. (The rationale is that their partners are more likely to exact digital revenge if it occurs virtually.) But if I’m in their shoes, I don’t think my conclusion would be “my freshman year of college is ruined if I don’t dump my high school sweetheart today.” That’s a few too many leaps and assumptions. Sweethearts needs you to swallow a movie logic pill to put the rest of the film in motion.
But what really keeps Sweethearts in “high end comedy junk food” territory as opposed to “Michelin Star dick joke cuisine” is that the lead characters’ definitions are too blurry. By the third act, the movie has staked out pretty clear angles for each of them, but it takes awhile to get there: Jamie is jaded and reluctant to let people in; Ben is conflict-averse and afraid of shaking up the status quo. These just aren’t rich enough characterizations to really make the emotional heart of the story pop, so we’re stuck with “19-year-old doofuses being doofuses” as the movie’s main thrust. And that’s not entirely a bad thing! In a fast-paced, episodic raunch-fest like this, you don’t actually need well-drawn character sketches for the movie to click, as much as you might want them.
Keeping the Superbad parallels going, Sweethearts has a B-plot of a third wheel mostly cordoned off in a separate story. Palmer (Caleb Hearon), another friend of Jamie and Ben’s, is in the middle of a gap year, which he is spending working menial labor at a bakery in Paris. He has a big social change planned for his Thanksgiving visit home, too: He is going to come out as gay to his small town community, and is planning to host a “petite soiree” as his moment to share his truth.
What we’re left with, then, is a funny movie that follows a couple criss-crossing threads across a wild series of parties, which is really all Sweethearts needs to be to work. But director and co-writer Jordan Weiss has designed a film that’s a bit more clever than, e.g., Prom Dates, which is content to simply trot out an acceptable execution of a worn formula. Sweethearts’ brains comes in the subversion I mentioned at the start of this review: Both the A-plot and B-plot are built from the ground up to twist the expected stories back on themselves. When Palmer comes out, the escalating joke is that not only is nobody surprised or resistant, but nobody really cares. In fact, traditional masculine figures like a firefighter and a football coach are comfortably out and accepted around town; the sour, dated coming-out beats of slur-slinging bullies are nowhere to be seen. In fact, it is Palmer, who embraces and flamboyantly leans into his stereotypes, who needs to be open-minded and accept that being queer doesn’t put him in a box.
Meanwhile, Jamie and Ben’s breakup saga zigs and zags around the tropes of the familiar get-laid odyssey. Their quest is upside down: they are chasing down paramours in order to dump them rather than bed them. The friends-to-lovers tension rises all film long, then crashes when you expect it to crest. Weiss frequently references When Harry Met Sally, embedding a couple of clips of it into Sweethearts’ conclusion, right as the besties-vs.-soulmates dynamic surrounding Jamie and Ben is most pregnant. But Sweethearts pivots from When Harry Met Sally’s inevitable union. It adds some richness and unpredictability to the leads’ relationship. I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s disappointing and maybe even implausible that Jamie and Ben ultimately reject romance and sexual gratification; Sweethearts is admittedly a romcom in structure without a traditional happily ever after. (Though I think you can read the very final scene as both characters finding a new spark for each other as they dance to Carly Rae Jepsen together…) And yet I love how fearlessly and ambivalently it reshapes the predictable genre contours while still keeping the comfortable texture and structure of a breezy, raunchy comedy.
I don’t want to oversell it. I picked it as one of my twenty favorite movies of the year, but only barely. I like that it has edge, but a couple of gags and characters are quite mean-spirited. Of the three leads, Hearon leaves the strongest impression with some terrific deliveries and reactions — I wouldn’t be surprised to see him show up in more comedies in the next few years. Hiraga more often plays the stoner best friend in these type of movies, and you can tell he’s going out of his way to keep Ben human and sympathetic rather than freewheeling as the lead. Shipka, meanwhile, has some hysterical deliveries, but seems a little confused on her character’s personality. They are both good rather than great, but at least Hiraga and Shipka have strong chemistry; perhaps they even overplay it given the film’s non-romantic destination.
Flaws, quirks, and all, I really like Sweethearts. Most importantly, it is funny and zippy; but it’s a little bolder than your average teen comedy fare. Ignore the mixed reviews and social media thrashings. As I said, I am right and everyone else is wrong. Especially Nate.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.