Having been released at the Sundance Film Festival over two years ago (along with Cooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” also starring Dakota Johnson), Stephanie Allyne’s “Am I Ok?” co-directed with Tig Notaro is a simple, heartwarming story about the nuances of friendship as well as the anxiety and fears of coming out and exploring one’s sexuality.
Am I OK? (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Almost serving as a throwback to mumblecore in more ways than one, “Am I OK?” is a mostly conversational movie about the friendship between two women. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a 32-year-old woman living in Los Angeles with her best friend Jane (Sonoya Mizuno). She works as a receptionist at a spa and used to have a knack for painting. Her romantic life is almost nonexistent, as she remains disinterested or plain unlucky. She even naively believes that her best male friend, Ben, will maintain the platonic nature of their friendship until he tries to kiss Lucy, and Lucy almost catapults off her bed in retaliation.
What is Lucy scared about?
In contrast to Lucy, Jane is a high achiever. Working at a big corporate job that she genuinely likes, she receives a promotion that would allow her to relocate to London, where she was born. Jane and her boyfriend Danny (Jermaine Fowler) and Lucy go out for drinks to celebrate. While conversing about Lucy’s unhappy love life, Jane reveals that she had kissed one of their female friends back when she was a teenager. Lucy, flabbergasted, drunk, and emotionally vulnerable over her best friend moving away halfway around the world, later reveals to Jane that she might be a lesbian. Sympathetic about her plight, Jane tries to convince Lucy to explore these feelings and come to a conclusion, encouraging her to reciprocate the flirtatious advances of Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), one of the massage therapists at Lucy’s spa.
Why do Jane and Lucy drift apart?
Lucy, confused and unable to decide, having to resort to online polls to understand her sexual orientation and failing, decides to take the plunge and invites Brittany to dinner. Their conversation slowly progresses beyond pleasantries. Brittany feels strangely ambivalent, content to converse about her ex-boyfriend but also acknowledging that her sexuality is on a spectrum. Her relationship with Lucy hits it off because she is one of the few who took an interest in her doodles and later in Lucy’s paintings that she had shoved up in her attic. But Brittany leaves by planting a kiss at the corner of Lucy’s mouth, which leaves her even more confused.
Jane finally decides to help speed up the process by taking her to “Womb,” a lesbian bar. However, for a shy and reserved person like Lucy, a new setting feels far more daunting to her, and Jane’s outgoing nature resulted in her enjoying herself at the club and even kissing one of the women on the dance floor. Disheartened, Lucy leaves the club.
The next day, after temporarily not speaking for a couple of hours, the two women meet up for lunch at Jane’s office. However, the differences between Lucy and Jane slowly start to form cracks in their relationship. Lucy doesn’t like Jane’s co-worker at the office, Kat (Molly Gordon), who serves as the comic relief as one of the try-hard millennials obsessed with social media, and also how Jane would project an image of herself she isn’t comfortable with. Meanwhile, Jane, obsessed with micromanagement, is used to pushing Lucy to take initiative, and thus, Lucy finally revolts against it. She counters Jane’s frustration at not having been told about Lucy’s confusion about her sexuality by reminding Lucy that, at the end of the day, this is about Lucy herself and not anybody else. The fight turns ugly, and they finally stop speaking to each other.
Meanwhile, Lucy’s closeness with Brittany is improving, so Brittany invites Lucy to a try-on-old-clothes party at her house. That evening, while smoking pot and generally enjoying each other’s company, the two have sex. However, the next morning, Brittany quickly leaves the house, slowly starts becoming distant from Lucy, and even takes steps toward reconciling with her ex-boyfriend.
Jane has been dealing with not conversing with her best friend and is trepidatious about how to break the ice between them. She is also consumed with the pressure of the move, and the break with Lucy urges her to accelerate the timeline, agreeing with her boss to shift a week early. However, that drives a wedge between Jane and her boyfriend, who, at her birthday dinner, informs her that he is uncomfortable moving to another country with her as he likes his life in LA.
Am I OK? (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Why does Lucy decide to move to London with her best friend?
Brittany informs Lucy that she will be moving back to her ex-boyfriend’s town, and even though she is not sure whether they are moving back together, she would like to see where this goes. One night, Lucy meets up with Ben over dinner and comes out to him. Realizing Ben’s easy-going acceptance of the situation bolsters her courage. She signs up on a dating app, starts going out on dates with other women, and even resumes painting.
For Jane, the hammock retreat that she is forced to attend at Kat’s insistence leads her to finally realize (in a hilarious sequence where she screams her frustration out at the instructor’s face) that she misses her best friend. The two of them slowly reconcile at their favorite restaurant, where they both have changed. Lucy, always the believer in routine and familiarity, even with her choice of food, is open to mixing things up, and her revelation of the last couple of weeks truly surprises Jane. Lucy also satiates Jane’s curiosity by informing her about the night she had spent with Brittany and ultimately dismissing the event by rationalizing that Brittany is straight and she had been experimenting that night.
Moreover, Lucy is surprised about the two major events that occurred in Jane’s life: her move to London occurring a week earlier and her boyfriend not accompanying her. Realizing that nothing is holding her to Los Angeles other than Jane, Lucy surprises Jane on the day of her move. She first drives, an action she historically isn’t very good at, and later, while driving Jane to the airport, she informs her that she is accompanying her to London and that she has even packed her passport with her.
For a character like Jane, content to live in a world where nothing much changes, deciding to explore her sexuality as well as opening up to her best friend would be enough of an example of courage. The true showcase of her growth was her decision to move to a new country with her best friend, shifting the dynamics between the two of them and becoming the support system for a change. Also, choosing to move for an undecided amount of time left Lucy with a lot of options to explore, both personally and professionally, a far cry from the inertia she had found herself in at the beginning of the movie.
Am I OK? (2024) Movie Review:
Perhaps the criticism that becoming the resident film festival for independent, low-budget filmmaking had adversely affected movies coming out of Sundance, at least in terms of aesthetics, “Am I OK?” almost feels like a throwback to the mumblecore era, where emphasis on dialogue and the dynamics of young adults take precedence over plot.
But amidst the film’s overtly simplistic and sometimes saccharine tonality, what works is Dakota Johnson’s portrayal of Lucy and the chemistry she shares with Sonoya Mizuno’s Jane. That easygoing naturalistic chemistry brings their friendship into sharper focus, making the movie’s theme of friendship between millennials have a larger impact than the coming-of-age story regarding Lucy and her sexuality.
There are smaller moments, little pieces of dialogue and banter, as well as Johnson’s easygoing, laidback likeability, that make Lucy’s character heartwarming. Her fears and receding herself into a shell of comfort and familiarity feel relatable, as does her fear of being alone for the rest of her life. The movie, however, never really makes much stride regarding the exploration of inertia that Lucy’s character experiences, nor does Jane’s life apart from Lucy strike as anything memorable.
The purpose of Kat as a character in the film is pretty evident—to show the projection of Jane as a separate character from the one she shares with Lucy—but all these moments feel barely touched upon. Then again, at 86 minutes, the movie is paced breezily, but it also feels unfocused in certain instances. It is the most comfortable way to explore the friendship of these two women, and thus, the emotional poignancy felt by these characters once they have broken up is translated effectively to the audience. It is very pleasant to watch, with jokes that are inoffensive and witty enough to elicit chuckles.
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