Stream It Or Skip It: ‘One of Them Days’ on Netflix, in Which Keke Palmer and SZA Spark Up Lots of Buddy-Comedy Laughs

One of Them Days (now streaming on Netflix) doesn’t reinvent the day-in-the-life buddy comedy, but it sharpens the template enough to make it enjoyable. It starts with the near-perfect pairing of Keke Palmer and SZA (in her first acting role), who play besties busting their butts to make rent so they don’t find themselves sleeping on the Los Angeles sidewalk. And it reflects their inspired interplay – and a spirited script by Rap Sh!t creator Syreeta Singleton – that the movie was a nice little theatrical hit in dreary January, grossing $51 million, and illustrating how the Friday formula can be a winner for a movie led by two very funny Black women.

ONE OF THEM DAYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Fifteen hundred dollars. That’s how much rent is in this dump – this dump with the crumbling ceilings and water damage. It’s in a pastel-painted stucco apartment building with a cute little courtyard, the type that dot the modest neighborhoods of L.A. Dreux (Palmer) is weary from an overnight shift waiting tables at the SoCal diner chain Norms, and she can’t walk in the door without tripping over her roomie’s layabout freeloader live-in well-hung good-for-nothing-except-what-he-can-do-because-he’s-well-hung boyfriend’s scattered sneaker collection. “You keep saying you need to exercise more,” Alyssa (SZA) says. “Every time you stumble, you get more steps!” 

Dreux sighs. It’s a sweltering day. The a/c doesn’t work, of course. And it’s the first of the month. That fifteen hundred bucks is due, and Alyssa “made sure” it got paid by giving the cash to her layabout freeloader etc. boyfriend, Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) so he could pass it on to the landlord Uche (Rizi Timane), who doesn’t have it because Keshawn blew the dough on an investment in T-shirts that say “Cucci” on them. This is what happens when you’re the leads in a ridiculous movie. The bigger picture, though, is what happens to a lot of people who work for pennies but have to pay out pounds to live. It forces people to get creative, which Dreux and Alyssa must do during the next several hours of their lives, lest Uche put all their furniture on the curb and find another sucker to occupy the space. 

The thought of shaking down Keshawn gets complicated after they chase him to his other girlfriend’s place, and this lady, Berniece (Aziza Scott) runs like a turbocharged T-1000 and stops just shy of firing laser beams from her eyes. They try one of those cash-advance places, but a homeless fella named Lucky (Katt Williams) stands out front warning them it’s a trap and a scam – “Heed is not being taken!” he laments – but it doesn’t matter because the loan officer cackles like the Joker when she sees Dreux’s credit score. They try selling blood, and quick-flipping a valuable vintage pair of Air Jordan’s they find hanging from a power line. It all goes poorly, as you’d imagine, their misadventures threatening to torpedo the one thing that might assuage the rent issue moving forward, namely Dreux’s big job interview for a franchise manager position at Norms. And of course they interact with a variety of neighborhood friends and weirdos – hunky love interest Maniac (Patrick Cage), new neighbor Bethany (Maude Apatow), gun-toting gangsta King Lolo (Amin Joseph), etc. – some of whom help and some of whom hinder. A lot can happen in 24 hours when you’re desperate. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: One of Them Days is Friday (or maybe House Party) meets Girls Trip, and it’s worth remembering that Do the Right Thing also played out during one tense, very hot day. 

Performance Worth Watching: Flat-out, the movie doesn’t work without Palmer’s ability to smooth-shift from funny to earnest at will.

Memorable Dialogue: Dreux looks at the sign touting the cash-advance joint’s loan-interest rate: “Damn, I thought that was the year of establishment.” 

Sex and Skin: Just the outline of Keshawn’s <insert honk noise here> through his boxer briefs.

Our Take: Sometimes, you have no choice but to walk through the drive-thru to use your coupon for free pie, and no choice but to swallow the hardship of a masked drive-thru pie-snatcher stealing it. That’s the perfect representative scene for One of Them Days, a quiet love letter to urban L.A. that follows Palmer and SZA tightly as they inevitably take one step forward, then take two steps back, because it’s funnier that way. Not all the bits work – the blood-bank sequence is a clunker – but Singleton, director Lawrence Lamont and the inspired, well-chosen cast deliver far more hits than misses.

But one of them days, note the lowercase, does not necessarily imply despair or hopelessness, especially when the various members of Alyssa and Dreux’s community eventually come together to help them, either unaware or outright ignoring the fact that their hardship is due to Alyssa’s glaring lack of good judgment. But hey, so much happens between dawn and dusk in this movie, you tend to forget how she effed up that morning, until you remember how satisfied Alyssa looked after shtoinking her idiot boyfriend, and, let’s be real here, you can’t blame her for being a little loosey-goosey. 

The movie is full of these clever little complexities, thanks to the screenplay’s smooth integration of relatable social ills and day-to-day stress points with goofy comedy, and Palmer’s ability to seamlessly transition from comic exasperation to forthright sincerity – and SZA is surprisingly gifted in the art of comic timing as the primary punchline machine to her co-star’s straight woman, although they sometimes swap those roles without missing a beat. They work together well as believable BFFs, and if Alyssa and Dreux can make it through this trial-ridden day, you can put extra emphasis on that second F. Because more often than not, friendship is exactly what you need to get through hardship.

Our Call: One of Them Days neatly balances the character stuff of hangout movies with a propulsive plot-driven narrative and genuinely funny bits, which is something many comedies struggle to achieve. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.