It’s perhaps an understatement to say this teen comedy yields to clichés. Yet, it avoids stereotypes and subverts a few classic tropes too. Here, the gay best friend is, in fact, the main character; the jockish football star is kind and deeply sensitive; and the classically pretty girl on whom the other two have set their eyes is not vapid and cruel but full of substance and intellect.

Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) is a smart, introverted college senior who, in spite of her good grades, plans to stay home in Squahamish in Washington State with her father, instead of going away to college as her English teacher encourages her to. She has no friends, and she writes for extra money many of the other students’ papers. When Paul (Daniel Diemer) approaches her, he asks not for help with his schoolwork but with love letters. He intends to win the heart of Aster (Alexxis Lemire). Ellie also has her eyes on Aster, secretly. The two of them form an unlikely friendship as Ellie counsels him in his attempts to woo Aster, which, of course, becomes complicated. It is Ellie’s words, after all, that get Aster’s attention. 

These three kind, well-meaning teens all will have their preconceived notions about one another overturned. Paul is not the mindless football player Ellie mistakes him for, but loyal and genuine. He’s in awe of her intelligence and defends her against bullies. They also come to appreciate one another’s very different family situations, hers with an immigrant father who is overqualified for his position at the train station, his with a large, restaurant-owning family that expects him to join their business.

There is also much comedy to be found in watching their disparate personalities collaborate to make sense of the complicated business of love. Aster, meanwhile, is tired of her popular boyfriend and the baggage that being a pretty girl entails. She wants, instead, someone with whom she can discuss books. All of them struggle with the expectations that have been placed on them, all of them end up hurting one another, and all, ultimately, is forgiven. 

However, there are multiple scenes of the sort that, painfully, only seem to happen in high school–set movies, whether at a talent show where a protagonist is finally allowed to come out of her shell or where a main character confronts an unwitting and aghast crowd with newly articulated ideas about the nature of love. One gets the sense that the filmmaker took the last line of Boyhood (“You know how everyone’s always saying, ‘seize the moment’? I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around, you know, like the moment seizes us.”) and decided to create at least five scenes that encapsulate it. None of them depart much from the known or expected.

But, honestly, The Half of It is a lot of fun and incredibly comforting. Its overpowering sweetness makes up for its flaws. If you let it affect you, the romcom is an excellent quarantine watch; it might take your mind off these troubling times. While the critic in me occasionally put his head in his hands and cringed, the moviegoer kept watching and was ultimately warmed. 

The Half of It won the Best Narrative Feature award in the U.S. Narrative section at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.