Even Lesbian Dakota Johnson Can’t Make This Coming-Out Comedy Fun

It’s Pride month, which means that if you’re within 100 yards of an open bottle of Tito’s vodka or a DSW with a sale on Tevas, you’re liable to hear a coming-out story. And listen: Coming out is a process that looks different for everybody. Some people have no problem coming out to their family and friends as soon as they’re sure of their sexuality. Others, like me, start crying before their clarinet lesson because they feel like they have to tell their mom something, but can’t quite spit it out for another eight hours. Despite how far we’ve come with progressing collective social thought, telling your loved ones that you’re queer remains delicate.

For Dakota Johnson’s character, Lucy, in Am I OK?, it’s also insufferable. The new dramedy directed by comedian Tig Notaro and her wife, actress Stephanie Allyne (now streaming on Max) is a well-intentioned but grating look at coming out in your thirties. Lucy is a textbook late bloomer who only finds herself admitting to her feelings for women when she has a drunken conversation with her best friend; turns out a booze-fueled safe space was all it took for her to drop the right hints. Lucy is 32, and the longer she’s held onto this secret, the more pathetic she feels for not just owning up to it as she’s gotten older.

While it’s really no big deal for someone to be figuring out their sexuality at 32, Lucy can’t seem to bear the anguish of starting down the path ahead of her. Life as a gay woman is filled with such crushing uncertainties as, “What app will I use to meet other lesbians?” and, “Is my flirtatious coworker into me?” Of course, these are common concerns across the spectrum of queerness, but for Lucy—a grown adult with a cushy job, seemingly no family, and a whole-ass house in Los Angeles—they are somehow inflated into overwhelming anxieties.

Perhaps that’s screenwriter Lauren Pomerantz’s intention: showing viewers that coming out is a metamorphic experience, regardless of your age and privilege. But an emotionless screenplay, tepid performances, and choppy direction muddle that sentiment beyond repair, turning Lucy’s relatable journey into an aggravating, myopic look at queer millennial entitlement.

If Lucy didn’t already dress exactly like a lesbian (a lot of beanies and caps), the fact that she recoils entirely when a guy tries to kiss her should be enough to tip her off. But even that isn’t all the proof that Lucy needs to own up to what she’s feeling internally. She chalks her bad luck with guys up to wanting to take things slow in relationships, which Jane doesn’t buy. That’s why, when Jane tells Lucy about the time she kissed a girl they both knew in high school, Lucy seizes her moment to tell her best friend that she wishes she could make out with another woman too.

This scene is Am I OK?’s sole resonant moment, so it’s not great that it appears just 20 minutes in. But it’s nice that Lucy and Jane’s conversation—the most important exchange in the film—has flashes of realism embedded into it, the kind of little jokes and depressing admissions that two close friends only feel comfortable making when they’re alone with one another. Jane reassures her friend that there’s no timeline for figuring out queerness, but Lucy remains defeated and confused. It’s daunting to think that you’ve spent so much of your life plodding down one road, when you could’ve been joyfully strutting down another. Having to change that course at 32 years old is even more frightening.

Luckily for Lucy, she’s got everything else working in her favor. She has reliable, loving friends and a stable job at a spa that seems to pay the bills well enough for her to afford a beautiful home, even if spa reception isn’t quite the artist’s life that she’d hoped for. Because of all of this, it’s empathizing with Lucy’s grappling over her sexuality is a chore. Does she really have that many obstacles to overcome? We’re never given a single lick of backstory or exposition for her character, so why she continues to fight the slow transition into a new love life never becomes clear.

But nevertheless, she persists! When Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), a young, beautiful, and touchy-feely new masseuse at the spa keeps implying that she might be into Lucy, Jane is weary. She warns Lucy that two women trying to figure out if they’re gay together could very easily lead to heartbreak, but Jane is also serving Lucy plenty of heartbreak of her own. Jane scores a promotion at her very vague job, one that will take her to London to open up a new office, and away from Lucy at the most vulnerable time of her life. Suddenly, a new rift appears between the two lifelong best friends, and plenty of preposterous fighting turns this coming-out comedy into a friendship drama.

The problem is that Am I OK? isn’t particularly good at being either of those things in the first place, let alone an amalgam of them both. Despite being directed and written by two venerable voices in comedy, the film is sparse on laughs—at least intentional ones. After Brittany gives Lucy a little at-work shoulder rub, Jane utters the phrase, “You were touched by someone whose job it is to touch people for a living.” That line of dialogue’s redundant phrasing is far more humorous than any punchline in the rest of the scene, and it doesn’t help that neither Mizuno nor Johnson has much of a handle on how to make this rickety script feel natural.

While the debate over Johnson’s talents continues to rage on, I fall firmly in the camp that she is a stellar performer but often miscast. Am I OK? is, unfortunately, no different. While Lucy is charming enough, she’s frustratingly underwritten, and Johnson’s performance is unable to tap into whatever personality might exist between the lines of Pomerantz’s script. Mizuno is similarly trapped in a flimsy character, and the two actors often compete for which person can read more unnaturally in any given two-shot frame. Molly Gordon provides some occasional, much-needed comic relief as Jane’s coworker Kat, but even she feels shoehorned into the film at times.

That rushed feeling persists throughout the movie, as some rough editing threatens to buckle what is already volatile pacing. Am I OK?’s story structure is wretched; it’s impossible to ascertain where we are in Lucy’s emotional arc, never mind how far along we are in the runtime. Its middle feels like it could be its end and vice versa. And by the time things actually do get to their eventual conclusion, they are as easily tied-up as you’d expect from a movie about a young, upper middle class white woman, living in Los Angeles, who finally admits to herself that she likes girls.

While not every coming-out story needs to be filled with deep pain and ecstatic revelations, it would be nice for this unconventional take on a queer subgenre to be at least a little self-aware. Yes, Lucy will be more than OK—she’ll be great. The same just can’t be said about the film.