How to Be Single

Call us cyn­i­cal but a stu­dio film called How to Be Sin­gle all but guar­an­tees that it will end with the female leads walk­ing into the sun­set, arm-in-arm with win­some hon­eys – sin­gle­dom hav­ing taught them to appre­ci­ate the val­ue of a good man. Amy Schumer’s Train­wreck launched itself on a sim­i­lar premise, appear­ing to cel­e­brate a promis­cu­ous bach­e­lorette before crum­pling in on itself to reveal that Amy’s abun­dant shag­ging was not mak­ing her hap­py. What she real­ly need­ed was for Bill Had­er to save the day by being a STUMP (Sup­port­ive, Tol­er­ant, Unde­mand­ing, Monog­a­mous Partner).

How to Be Sin­gle sticks to its tit­u­lar guns through­out a fast-paced and pro­gres­sive com­e­dy that plays like a thor­ough­ly mod­ern screw­ball. In The Gold­en Age, cou­ples would bick­er wit­ti­ly but kiss and make-up in time for the end cred­its, while this film savours a lifestyle in which women save their most inti­mate and dynam­ic con­ver­sa­tions for friends. Sex and love inter­ests cir­cle the periph­ery, but falling into their ​“dick­sand” is to be avoid­ed. ​“Dick­sand” is an essen­tial con­cept that, like all great new terms, can imme­di­ate­ly find appli­ca­tion in dai­ly con­ver­sa­tions. Falling into dick­sand is when we set our hard-won iden­ti­ty aside for the sake of a sexy man.

The film is burst­ing with handy phras­es for mod­ern liv­ing, most of them spo­ken in a dry dead­pan by MVP Rebel Wil­son. Her char­ac­ter Robin oper­ates as sin­gle-life spir­it-guide to Dako­ta Johnson’s Alice. Fresh out of col­lege, Alice has cho­sen to go ​‘on a break’ with her long-term boyfriend to expe­ri­ence what it’s like to be sin­gle for the first time in her adult life.

This is the kind of film world in which Alice and Robin are seen going to their job at a law firm for less than two days – a film world in which Alice’s open­ing-cred­its relo­ca­tion to New York fea­tures her in a yel­low taxi dri­ving towards the icon­ic sky­line accom­pa­nied by Tay­lor Swift’s ​‘Wel­come to New York’. This unsub­tle and air­brushed lifestyle doesn’t have time to grate as the film deliv­ers good-natured joke after good-natured joke and enjoy­able char­ac­ter after enjoy­able character.

Robin is the hedo­nis­tic, con­fi­dent sin­gle rat­tling off lines like, ​“He’s a palette-cleanser, he’s sex­u­al sor­bet”. Alice is the fal­ter­ing, every­woman-styled sin­gle whose arc of learn­ing to be alone is the cen­tral one. Her old­er sis­ter Meg (Leslie Mann) is a worka­holic doc­tor and adamant that she’s a strong inde­pen­dent lady. Lucy (Ali­son Brie) is sin­gle-mind­ed about not being sin­gle. She has her wed­ding planned and just needs to find a man to slot into pre­con­ceived rela­tion­ship goals.

Lead­ing the sup­port­ing cast of eli­gi­ble men is Tom (Anders Holm) whose bar and bed­room are always open to lady friends, pro­vid­ed that they don’t try to stay for break­fast. Jake Lacy and Damon Wayans Jr show up to be charm­ing and pro­gres­sive visions of sin­gle men, while Nicholas Braun is per­fect­ly cast as Alice’s ex, Josh, whose cook­ie-cut­ter good looks scream STUMP. ​“Makes sense,” says one of the char­ac­ters when they final­ly encounter him.

Chris­t­ian Dit­ter directs like a good ref­er­ee – let­ting his per­form­ers define the tem­po of the game, rat-a-tat­ting all they can out of a qui­et­ly rad­i­cal script from Abby Kohn, Marc Sil­ver­stein and Dana Fox (which is loose­ly based on Liz Tuccillo’s 2007 nov­el). Life-chang­ing issues like arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion and untime­ly death are han­dled with unshowy sen­si­tiv­i­ty, swept up in an irre­sistible momen­tum that only flags when the film unwise­ly ghosts on Rebel Wil­son for a long stretch.

There are play­ful nods to a grat­i­fy­ing swathe of cul­tur­al touch­stones, from old mono­liths like Friends to new trends like cat emo­jis. How to Be Sin­gle is not out to shake-up the rom-com genre. Like Robin, it just wants to show you a good time. Still, these good times are built atop a refresh­ing atti­tude towards gen­der pol­i­tics and being sin­gle that has scarce­ly been seen before in main­stream cinema.