It must be difficult to pull off a comedy about bulimia, but writer-director John Early’s ingenious directorial debut is a winner. Inspired by a mishmash array of movies, specifically Arthur Allan Seidelman’s 1986 TV movie, the Meredith Baxter-starring Kate’s Secret, Early’s picture mixes tones successfully—both lighthearted and dark, a bit snide, but mostly earnest and heartfelt.

Early stars as Maddie, who, along with her best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant), is a lowly dishwasher at a Los Angeles studio for a food content company. In the beginning, the hostile (perhaps envious) Emily (Claudia O’Doherty) is the social media star, but Maddie quickly eclipses her, becoming a viral sensation for her inventive recipes after her husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), helps edit Instagram videos of her cooking vegetarian cuisine. After Maddie is selected as a star content creator, the new spotlight underlines her body dysmorphia issues and resurrects the demons of her past, specifically the abuse she endured from her narcissistic mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnston).

Early’s marvelous characterization of Maddie, whom Early accurately describes in the press notes as an “ingenue,” is fully realized, complex, and sympathetic. She is funny but not treated as a joke, maintaining a nervous, cheery attitude beneath a wispy blond wig. The film is well cast, including memorable turns in small roles, especially Johnston’s dour, rough-edged Beverlee, vaping in front of her reflection in the TV screen (surely a nod to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows) while talking to Maddie during a tense, once-in-a-blue-moon phone conversation. Vanessa Bayer is also terrific as Julie, Maddie’s eating disorder rehab clinic roommate, echoing Brittany Murphy in Girl, Interrupted. (Those clinic scenes become a bit repetitive and long in the tooth, one of the film’s few flaws.) Berlant plays Deena’s silliness and affection—maybe even a borderline obsession with Maddie—well throughout. Also good is Rahill as the supportive husband, though Jake is maybe a little too hellbent on Maddie bearing his child. (To add, it’s nice to see a beefy body type treated with the same dose of eroticism that a cut, muscular male typically gets on film.)

Vibrant and full of visual panache, the myriad cinematic references are a joy to spot. The shots of the insensitive Beverlee’s wicked frozen steak delivery service to the vegetarian Maddie allude to the red flashes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, symbolic of the titular characters’ trauma. There’s a Fosse-inspired dance class that Maddie joins with Deena that includes an absurd routine. I kept waiting for Michael Hesslein’s vigorous (and suitably, just a tad kitschy) score to break into “I Sing the Body Electric” from Fame.

I fortunately caught this film at the Provincetown International Film Festival, where musician, author, and Provincetown local Roddy Bottum interviewed Early afterward. Bottum compared Early’s performance to Paul Reubens’s Pee-wee Herman—both lovable oddballs and singular portrayals. Early mentioned envisioning a trilogy of Maddie films, perhaps in a DVD box set with cute cover art and little lockets. If we could only be so lucky.