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Jul 28, 2017 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

It’s not hard to imagine someone wanting to make a movie about Jessica Williams. After making a splash as the youngest correspondent in the history of The Daily Show, Williams seemed poised for great things. Her striking appearance and infectious bravado make her an ideal centerpiece around which to build a character and a film. The Incredible Jessica James succeeds at the first half of the equation.

The two opening scenes make for a nice study in contrasts between what works and doesn’t work about the film. The first finds James on a rebound Tinder date after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend. In addition to being rude and self-centered, she’s also a fountain of obnoxious slang, claiming that drinking alcohol is “basic AF” and using the word “preesh” instead of “appreciate” like a millennial Cher Horowitz. Her date is a guileless chump, which makes it all reasonably funny, but still somewhat grating. Then come the credits, a charmingly goofy sequence of Jessica dancing her way from her bedroom to the rooftop of her Brooklyn apartment building. The film is counting on you to be as in love with James as she is with herself, mostly based on your pre-existing goodwill toward Williams as a personality. It’s a risky gamble, but it mostly works.

Even though she’s playing herself in the broad strokes, Williams can’t help but give James depth and nuance. The character is an aspiring playwright who teaches theater and improve classes for middle school kids, and Williams nails the aggressive, no-bullshit positivity that someone who excels in that job would naturally possess. She makes the exact face anyone of us would make when her new love interest – the latest in a line of amiable doormats played by Chris O’Dowd – tells her that he made his money inventing an app. She’s as unapologetic about her strengths as she is about her flaws, which makes a nice change of pace from most indie film protagonists, who are usually only upfront about one or the other.

Unfortunately, The Incredible Jessica James isn’t quite as incredible as Jessica James. The film shares its DNA with numerous works in the “twenty-something woman muddles through life in NYC” subgenre, but doesn’t quite equal any of them. It’s not as stylistically interesting or culturally specific as films like Frances Ha and Inappropriate Behavior, and mostly feels like it’s trying to split the difference between Girls and Broad City. It never hits the emotional rawness of the former and never quite earns the wacky humor of the latter. There are several bits that are genuinely funny and weird, like Jessica’s fantasy confrontations with her ex-boyfriend and a sequence in which her despair at having to attend a suburban baby shower is communicated by smash cuts set to death metal. But the movie ultimately ends up keeping these flourishes in the background in favor of an extremely straightforward plot about finding love and being true to oneself that everyone has seen a million times before. Works about the aimlessness of being young in a big city tend to shine when they eschew plots of any kind in favor of just hanging out with the characters. That should be doubly true when your protagonist is as much of a character as Jessica Williams.

Author rating: 4.5/10