When Sweethearts protagonists Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) and Ben (Nico Hiraga) travel back to their small Ohio hometown for Thanksgiving break their freshman year of college, they pass the local movie theater, whose marquee lists nothing but romantic comedies: He's Just Not That Into You, Crazy Stupid Love, When Harry Met Sally. In case that's not on-the-nose enough, Ben later watches When Harry Met Sally with his family, and director Jordan Weiss throws in extensive clips from that film, including Billy Crystal's oft-quoted speech about the impossibility of men and women being friends.
Weiss and her co-writer Dan Brier are perhaps overly self-conscious about their movie's connections to romantic comedies of the past, and that inability to let the story breathe is one thing that holds Sweethearts back. The movie's greatest asset is the chemistry between its two stars, both teen-movie veterans who shine in the roles of messy, codependent but ultimately likable young people trying to figure out their lives. There's none of the early antagonism of the relationship between Harry and Sally, and in 2024 it's pretty easy to accept that men and women can be friends, despite what rom-coms may tell us.
Jamie and Ben are so secure in their longstanding friendship that it doesn't seem to bother their respective high school sweethearts, even as the couples stay together in long-distance relationships following high school graduation. Jamie and Ben go to college together, while Jamie's football-player boyfriend Simon (Charlie Hall) is away at Harvard and Ben's girlfriend Claire (Ava DeMary) is still a high school senior. The pressure of maintaining those relationships holds Jamie and Ben back from fully embracing their college experience, though, and after a disastrous night out in which they both humiliate themselves in ill-fated efforts to please their partners, they both resolve to break things off when returning home for the holiday weekend.
It's a bit of a winding road to get there, during which Sweethearts turns into a gross-out college comedy, which isn't Weiss' strong suit. Once Jamie and Ben head home, the tone becomes, well, sweeter, even if there's still plenty of raunchy humor. The feeling of returning home after the first major time away is evocative material for a coming-of-age story, and Jamie and Ben have to face up to various aspects of their pasts, not just their lingering significant others.
Sweethearts frequently cuts away from that story for a substantial subplot about their friend Palmer (Caleb Hearon), who's been spending a gap year in Paris but has also returned to Ohio for Thanksgiving. At first he seems like nothing more than the stereotypical gay best friend, agreeing to run interference with Simon and Claire so that Jamie and Ben have the ideal circumstances to announce their breakups. But Weiss and Brier take him on his own journey of acceptance, as he struggles with coming out to a community that undoubtedly is already well-aware of his identity.
That arc could fuel its own entire movie, but it ends up both truncated and distracting, since it pulls away from the primary story while never getting enough time to develop on its own. Palmer's dawning understanding of the viability of queer life in small-town America could be read as either refreshingly optimistic or depressingly outdated in light of recent election results, but either way it comes off as rushed and unsatisfying.
Jamie and Ben's own arc is only slightly more satisfying, and that's more due to what Shipka and Hiraga can wordlessly convey between themselves than to Weiss' storytelling. Weiss previously created the two-season Hulu sitcom Dollface, which used fantastical elements to represent its main character's response to a traumatic breakup, but Sweethearts aims for something more grounded, and it occasionally finds genuine emotion in the central friendship. More often, though, it flails around with weak jokes and muddled life lessons, trying too hard to escape the shadow of the movies that it deliberately places itself under.
Sweethearts
Rated R
Directed by Jordan Weiss
Starring Kiernan Shipka, Nico Hiraga, Caleb Hearon
Streaming on Max
