Every great stoner movie is about what you’d be doing right now if you weren’t stoned. Or at least what you’d be doing if you were stoned and willing to leave the house. Classic films like “The Big Lebowski,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and various Cheech and/or Chong adventures depict the world as an absurdly eventful place where little problems quickly transform into epic adventures, and the only way to save the day is to get even more zonked.
Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls” is probably a new stoner classic. I haven’t watched it while high yet but it will one day be performance-tested under optimal conditions. (Kids? Leave serious film criticism to the professionals; don’t try this at home.) It’s a profoundly ridiculous movie where anything can happen if it’s funny, starring two top flight actors who are eager to embrace the absurd.
Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are Frankie and Molly, two potheads who live with their cats GG and Dio and are pretty sure they solved climate change while they were wasted the other night. Frankie dropped out of an ivy league college and now she uses her engineering genius to build Rube Goldberg super bongs. Molly is an incredible chef with a boyfriend Frankie hates, because he wants to move in with Molly and Frankie fears change. She’s also afraid of success and afraid her ex-boyfriend is moving on with a girl who looks just like her, also played by Kristen Stewart.
Frankie is in no danger of success, but Molly moving out and her boyfriend moving on with a lookalike? That’s actually happening. But then, in a twist right out of “North By Northwest” (but 30% wackier), Frankie comes into possession of a mysterious package, delivered by a mercenary whose name she can’t remember. All she knows is he’s not a metal head so she calls him Not Metal Head Dave (LaKeith Stanfield). The package has a bunch of glowing super drugs inside and, since Frankie and Molly can’t make rent, they decide to sell this secret stash. But they don’t know what it does so they dilute a small amount in water and test it out, extremely carefully.
Just kidding. They shotgun it. Their cats even lick some off the floor, which in real life would be a bad thing (just like shotgunning bottles of unknown pharmaceuticals). But in “The Wrong Girls,” it means they all get psychic powers. Now they can read each other’s minds — GG and Dio sound just like Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen (what are the odds?) — and they’re pretty sure they can move solid objects. Sometimes. Maybe. If weed is involved.
Now they’re at the center of an international conspiracy between foreign nationals, mad scientists, the FBI and a cabal of European assassins. And to think, all this might have happened to you if you’d simply left the house instead of watching Gregg Araki’s “Smiley Face” again while getting toasted.
“The Wrong Girls” is 100% nonsense and that’s what makes it perfect. Well, perfect for a stoner comedy. Every silly thing that could possibly happen must, inevitably, happen. Fortunately for all of us, Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are in almost every scene, slaying the nonsensical dialogue and gesticulating wildly at the slightest provocation. Stewart seems particularly liberated by this chance to go full clown-mode — almost everything she says or does is amusing, adorable or slightly annoying but in an adorably amusing way.
That’s the other thing about stoner movies: They don’t work if the audience wouldn’t want to smoke out with the protagonists. Stewart and Shawkat make a compelling case that they belong in any blunt rotation. They’re comic dynamos with grumpy pet cats, a pocketful of weed brownies (secret ingredient: blue cheese) and an extremely sensible obsession with Céline Dion. If you don’t love Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat in “The Wrong Girls,” you probably don’t know what love is. Or maybe you just have different taste in stoner comedies. I guess anything’s possible.
Smart filmmakers make the best stupid comedies, and Dylan Meyer is a smart filmmaker. “The Wrong Girls” always looks like it’s veering out of control but Meyer knows where she’s going and how to get us there. She also knows we’re probably high as hell and want to take the scenic route. So off we all pop on this wild, wild trip, with wonderful characters, a goofy sense of humor and what the heck, a psychic dance number. Fun Fact: You could improve literally any movie with a psychic dance number, but most filmmakers are too cowardly to try.
The ball’s in your court [picks random Oscar-nominated director out of a hat] … Denis Villeneuve. Go on. I dare you.
