Dazed and confused stoner comedy hard to get right

Stoner comedy has always been kind of a dude thing. Think of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Cheech & Chong, Ice Cube’s Friday franchise, Harold & Kumar, basically any movie with the young Seth Rogen.

Screenwriter Dylan Meyer (Moxie) provides a much-needed gender swap in her directorial debut, giving us Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as ride-or-die roommates Frankie and Molly. Dipping in and out of the gig economy and perpetually broke, they share their Los Angeles bungalow with two cats, a life-size cardboard cutout of Celine Dion and an enormously complicated “bong-a-tron” that takes up most of the living room.

Finally, finally, it’s women who get to be messy, aimless and really high.

Unfortunately, stoner movies — no matter the gender — are surprisingly hard to get right. The Wrong Girls is sweet and shaggy and intermittently funny, but Meyer ends up struggling with the genre’s common buzzkills.

First off, other people’s drug experiences are dull. Watching super-stoned people lying on the floor staring up at patterns on the ceiling is never going to be as much fun as being a super-stoned person lying on the floor staring up at patterns on the ceiling. And Meyer’s trippy sequences feel oddly generic, despite the stretchy time, the bendy space and the sparkly giant squids.

Then there’s the pacing issue. The stoner default setting tends to be “just hanging out on the couch, coughing and laughing.” At some point, though, something — anything! — needs to happen. Meyer ends up overcompensating wildly, with a busy, crowded plot set off by a MacGuffinish briefcase that contains “the most important scientific breakthrough of our time.”

The contents of the briefcase turn out to be vials of a powerful hallucinogen, which Molly and Frankie — of course — end up ingesting.

Combined with their constant use of THC (“Define ‘constant,’” says Molly), the drug makes the two women telepathic, able to read each other’s minds, as well as those of their cats (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen). (The cats, it turns out, are jerks.)

The ensuing briefcase-related shenanigans involve a gang of Eurotrash assassins, a mysterious fixer named Not Metal Head Dave (LaKeith Stanfield from I Love Boosters), a mad Danish scientist (Barbie’s Kate McKinnon) and a Stanford alumni party with predictably horrible rich people (including Arrested Development’s Tony Hale).

There’s also a mysterious unseen mega-villain pointedly named Mr. Kock, just in case you’re in any doubt about the perfidiousness of the patriarchy.

Shawkat has been showing off her comic chops since her Arrested Development days. Stewart often works in an intense, serious mode (in such films as Spencer and Seberg), and it’s good to see her all loosened up. The chemistry between the two feels lived-in and real, with Molly and Frankie’s relationship becoming a sincere celebration of female friendship.

But the two leads need more material. Stoner comedy may look mellow onscreen, but it requires a certain amount of labour and planning offscreen. In The Wrong Girls, it often feels as if Meyer and her crew are a little too much like the film’s characters — just goofing off, laughing at in-jokes and hoping everything will work out.

Some of it does work out. McKinnon is terrific, Stanfield is a great deadpan straight man, and there’s even a brief drop-in by Geena Davis (who in real life is one of the patron saints of female representation in film, having founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004).

But there are long, laugh-free lulls. The Wrong Girls may light one up for stoner gender parity, but the follow-through fizzles.

One last note: the Free Press’s general policy is that reviewers should not be high, so I watched this straight. Cannabis-using viewers might see it differently.

arts@winnipegfreepress.com