“Shiva Baby,” “Bottoms” and “Bodies Bodies Bodies” have given Rachel Sennott acting baggage, typecasting her as a confident-to-the-point-of-brazen, comically-blunt and cocksure (sorry) young woman whose allure has a contract rider.
You don’t want to cross her, or anybody she plays.
That makes the downbeat dramedy “I Used to be Funny” an inspired choice on her part. She plays into type and against it as a promising Toronto stand-up comic who has suffered trauma, abandoned her dreams and all but refused to ever leave her friends’ apartment.
Sam Cowell used to swagger onto the stage, swatting the audience with good-natured man-bashing, pronoun-curious teasing, femininity and rough sex jokes.
“My big flirty move on a date is to make the guy pinkie promise not to kill me…We need a Volkswagen level recall of men in general…Who am I to judge Justin Bieber’s youth pastor? Because I wanted to f— the Biebs, too.”
But something happened a couple of years back. She hasn’t left gay besties Paige (Sabrina Jalees) and Philip’s (Caleb Hearon) house since.
Seeing that the kid she used to nanny on TV listed as “missing” triggers flashbacks, a need to act and a recognition that “I Used to be Funny” and that she has a prayer of being that way again. If only she can get some closure.
Writer-director Ally Pankiw, a veteran of music videos and some pretty good TV series (“The Great,” “Black Mirror”) and Sennott create a young woman of means and a hint of direction — she has a fine arts degree, was an au pair in the UK for a couple of years, and has been a stand up for more years — and a glib way of looking at every subject, even the most serious ones.
“Ok, I’m gonna open with a ‘rape’ joke tonight.”
That’s what comics do.
Interviewing with the humorless cop-dad (Jason Jones of TV’s “The Detour”) of a twelve year old (Olga Petsa) in need of a nanny goes better than it should. At least Sam doesn’t joke about the unseen terminally ill wife.
Brooke, the child, doesn’t want a nanny. But the sassy, mouthy, conspiratorial Sam wins her over.
“You’re not like other nannies, are you?”
“You’re not like other kids, are you?”
We can too-easily guess what went wrong with all this, long before the many flashbacks to the nature of their confidences and Sam’s sense of responsibility about Brooke are laid out.
Sam saw Brooke a day or two after she disappeared. It didn’t go well. The cops she speaks to “know” Sam.
Her ex-beau (Ennis Esmer) figures in the flashbacks. Might they have a future? And those stand-up sets sampled suggest that maybe she’ll move beyond simply visiting her old comedy haunts and take up the mike again. Or not.
That depends on whether Sam can find the missing Brooke, who “hates” her.
Pankiw does a decent enough job keeping this narrative moving despite a slow pace that seems to predict a stall-out.
The milieu may be familiar, and the third act revelations and actions are both predictable and somewhat clumsily handled. But Sennott wraps herself completely around this character, giving us vulnerability behind the cocky facade, worry and responsibility in a profession not known for producing the stable and well-adjusted.
She’s good enough in this to make fans pine for the next time she chooses to be funny and nothing but. Well, funny and mean.
Rating: TV-MA, sexual assault, substance abuse by minors, profanity
Cast: Rachel Sennott, Olga Petsa, Jason Jones, Caleb Hearon, Ennis Esmer and Sabrina Jalees.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ally Pankiw. A Utopia release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:41
