straight up movie reviews

‘Straight Up’: Film Review

James Sweeney's tale of a young gay man who doesn't like sex — and thinks he must be straight — is a new kind of brainiac screwball comedy.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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There’s a tradition in movies, as vital as a hypnotic action scene or a swooning love scene, of dialogue so witty and nimble and rapid-fire that it comes at you like something out of a stylized dream. I first encountered that brand of high-velocity verbal jousting in “A Hard Day’s Night,” and later on in college when I saw “His Girl Friday,” a movie where the baroque banter flew with a manic spontaneity I could barely keep up with. (The dialogue was action.) More recent examples from the school of rockin’ ping-pong ferocity include the exhilarating aggro chatter of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and the mad analytical social satire of “Dear White People.”

In the independent romantic comedy “Straight Up,” the writer-director James Sweeney updates that grand and glorious mode of run-for-cover screwball to the age of pop-culture-saturated digital millennials who think faster than they can process. And he does it with a flair that would leave Ben Hecht smiling. Here’s a sample:

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“You called me.” “No, I didn’t.” “ Yes, you did.” “My butt dialed you.” “Well, I think your butt knows what your heart wants.”

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“Straight Up” tells the story of Todd (played by Sweeney), an insanely articulate Asian-American gay software coder, with shirts buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, who’s so quick and fussy and arch that the thoughts pour out of him like confessional word salad. He has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the way the film converts that into comedy isn’t by taking cheap shots at his fear of flying, or the fact that he’s a washer and a checker. No, the joke of “Straight Up” — at once funny and darkly serious — is that Todd’s entire personality is a form of OCD: the relentless micro-analyzing of reality, the cataloguing flow of his control-freak mind, and the way he uses it to run from his sexuality. He’s lonely and longs for a partner, but he can’t begin to deal with sex. It’s just…too messy. (He doesn’t like bodily fluids.)

So what he decides, on a whim of iron, is that the reason he’s running from his sexuality is that he is not , in fact, gay. He must be something else. He must be straight! Seated across from him at an L.A. diner, his two best friends — Meg (Dana Drori), a caustic model and superfreak, and Ryder (James Scully), his longtime gay chum — beg to differ. They try to set him, you know, straight. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” says Meg, “but even if you wanted to experiment, I don’t think you’d find anyone. Girls aren’t gay-blind anymore. This isn’t the ’60s.” Ryder: “And you’re no Rock Hudson.”

Todd replies, “I don’t think I’m that transparent. I could just be metro. Or hipster.” Ryder: “Todd, you’re like a Kinsey 6. Maybe a 5 when you’re not wearing cashmere.”

That’s an understatement. Todd, it’s clear to the audience, is not really having a sexual-identity crisis. He’s gay, and has convinced himself that he’s having a sexual-identity crisis, all to avoid confronting his real crisis: that he has walled himself off from the human race. Let’s call this a weirdly logical form of obsessive-compulsive erotic-romantic self-delusion.

Then Todd meets Rory (Katie Findlay). She, too, is a tightly wired brainiac, and from the moment they interface in a public library, where he’s busy stocking shelves (no, he doesn’t work there — it’s just the OCD), they form the kind of communion where you could say that they finish each other’s sentences, except in this case it sounds like one long sentence. They lock minds and debate, they bond over the fact that they each own all seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls,” and they confess their dark secrets (“You’re the nicest person in L.A.” “Really, I’m not. I lie to homeless people — I always have change, I just don’t give it to them”). They’re genius bees buzzing around the hive mind.

“Straight Up” is like a Wes Anderson movie written by Paul Rudnick, with a dash of ’90s Tarantino when Todd and Rory engage in the ultimate deconstruction of whether rain on your wedding cake is , in the end, ironic. There are spiky encounters between Todd and his therapist, slyly played by Tracie Thoms (“You’re willfully barking up the wrong tree. But I’m unclear as to what you’re even chasing”), as well as a terrific meet-the-parents scene in which Todd’s father (Randall Park) turns out to be the Archie Bunker of liberal yuppies. And Katie Findlay, as Rory, has the kind of knowing bloom that Haley Lu Richardson brought to “Columbus.” You can see why Rory blinds herself all too eagerly to her new boyfriend’s bedroom issues; she has found her soulmate by finding her brainmate-in-a-haystack. What makes “Straight Up” more than “Will & Grace” with anal-sex jokes is the way that it skewers the comedy of 21st-century correctness. Todd and Rory occupy a space where labels are so frowned upon that they fall in love, or superlike, or something by making sexual identity itself a taboo.

Taken at face value, “Straight Up” is the story of a gay dude who puts himself through his own form of gay-deprogramming therapy (so naturally, it’s doomed not to take). Is Todd someone who, as Ryder observes, “can’t get over your internalized homophobia”? Maybe so. But that doesn’t make him wrong — it just makes him damaged. “Straight Up” is really about a generation of people who have discovered a new way to connect through their detachment. A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. “Straight Up” is the work of a startling talent.

Reviewed online, New York, Feb. 26, 2020. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 95 MIN.

• Production: A Strand Releasing release of a Particular Crowd, Valparaiso Pictures release. Producers: David Carrico, Ross Putman, James Sweeney. Executive producer: Bobby Hoppey.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: James Sweeney. Camera: Greg Cotten. Editor: Keith Funkhouser. Music: Logan Nelson.
• With: James Sweeney, Katie Findlay, Dana Drori, James Scully, Betsy Brandt, Randall Park, Tracie Thoms.

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Straight Up Reviews

Sweeney’s writing and direction are bold and interesting, while his performance manages to be exceptional as well.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 5, 2022

It is a delightful, insightful peek into twenty-somethings and their obsessiveness with the idea of being left alone.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 16, 2021

Romantically subversive in ways that feel true to the current moment, Straight Up may well become an era-defining classic.

Full Review | Jan 14, 2021

Confusing finale aside, Straight Up is funny and touching, often in the same scene. Sweeney deserves to be commended for creating an admirable and entertaining feature-length debut.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Sep 2, 2020

Challenges both viewers and its characters to feel, think and listen at the same time, something that's easier said than done in reality and a rarity on screen.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 7, 2020

A relevant and resonant rom-com.

Full Review | May 27, 2020

Straight Up serves up identity politics in a surprising way, bringing fresh thinking to often tired genre tropes. It's a rom-com for people who think they've seen it all.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 26, 2020

[W]atching these two smart people outsmart themselves and each other has its modest yet real pleasures, not to mention an undercurrent of melancholy that makes the laughs stick to the ribs

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 6, 2020

A rat-a-tat screwball comedy with a very contemporary edge.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 27, 2020

On the surface, Sweeney's film is a playful examination of sexual fluidity, but underneath the gags, it's really a universal, sweet movie about the modern complexities of finding a soulmate.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 16, 2020

Unfortunately, some of its melancholy poignancy and sharp comedic observations don't always land as effectively as they could had Straight Up fluctuated between its highs and lows as it tends to percolate on mania.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 10, 2020

Sweeney and Findlay, who's a real find, are head-spinningly good here, juggling their torrents of dialogue with aplomb.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2020

Even though the characters are rather cartoonish, they're performed with an unfussy authenticity that makes them even funnier.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 2, 2020

Straight Up reaffirms that a truly worthy no frills, small budget indie can indeed emerge from L.A. As such, it's also a primer for aspiring filmmakers everywhere on making a good feature with with chump change and small cast in everyday locations.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2020

Straight Up's victory is the revelation that our own smarts are not smart enough to make up for romantic love; we seek something more.

An assured and refreshing first feature from writer/director/star James Sweeney.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 28, 2020

Straight Up is an outright character study with regards to one person dealing with their internalized homophobia while finding their soulmate.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 28, 2020

[T]he success of the film is in how firmly it establishes these characters as individuals and as a pair.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 27, 2020

Sweeney updates that grand and glorious mode of run-for-cover screwball to the age of pop-culture-saturated digital millennials who think faster than they can process. And he does it with a flair that would leave Ben Hecht smiling.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2020

The movie comes across as a rush of bouncy one-liners and arch formal conceits. You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don't sound rehearsed.

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The hollywood reporter's most powerful women in entertainment, ‘straight up’: film review | outfest 2019.

Multihyphenate James Sweeney's feature debut 'Straight Up' is an amusingly prickly and personal ambi/asexual rom-com.

By Keith Uhlich

Keith Uhlich

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Todd (James Sweeney) is trapped in a box. Literally, if you consider that Sweeney, who also wrote, directed and produced the rapid-fire queer (or am I?) dramedy Straight Up, constricts his characters to a 4:3 frame familiar from many a Golden Age Hollywood rom-com. Performance anxiety is prevalent. You get the sense that the twenty-something, OCD-afflicted Todd speaks so rat-a-tat because to slow down would mean certain death, or at least the need to deal with a highly shambolic reality.

Todd’s truth is that he doubts he’s the gay man he thought he was. Years of failed dating, and a disgust/fear of the bodily excretion that is the primary ingredient in a Dirty Sanchez, have brought him to this point. Clearly, as he tells both his sarcasm-prone therapist (Tracie Thoms) and his befuddled friend group, he must be straight. That in itself is another deflection, though it will take a feature film’s length of time to identify the real culprit. (Hint: It’s the L-word — not that one.) Until then, he’ll work through his hang-ups with struggling actress Rory (Katie Findlay), with whom he meets-cute in a library and who proves to be in almost every way his soul mate.

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She’s the Hepburn to his Tracy (don’t you doubt that Katharine and Spencer get name-checked). And the duo grow closer as they play house in the sunlit California residences that they look after to make ends meet. The pair heatedly dissect Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” and participate in an uncomfortable “Truth or Dare” evening. They even go to a party dressed as Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which begets an exegesis on the sublimated homosexuality of Newman’s injured character Britt.

The trans-generational citations come fast and furious, never lingered on for more than a sharply inhaled breath. Both Sweeney and Findlay are more than up to the task of playing arrested millennials dancing around their problems, forever walking a fine line between charm and aggravation. And Sweeney as filmmaker effectively goes the Wes Anderson route of letting emotion bust through all the aesthetic archness at key moments.

This is most moving in a sequence in which Todd takes Rory home to meet the folks. Mom ( Betsy Brandt ) and Dad ( Randall Park ) speak just as pointedly as their progeny, though their views on life, the universe and everything are slightly more weathered and antiquated, if still delivered at Autobahn momentum. Then the scene closes with a genuinely tender interaction between father and son, one that comes out of nowhere and yet feels, in this context, like a necessary reaction against and counterweight to the impish world Sweeney has created.

We often make our own psychological prisons, and Straight Up is a droll embodiment of its protagonist’s (and perhaps its maker’s?) inner turmoil. Todd’s sexual proclivities aren’t fully on one side or the other of the Kinsey scale. Maybe he has none at all (that’s fine, too!). He uses his acid wit to stave off life, and the degree to which Rory does the same gives them both a foundation for a beautiful friend(and-maybe-more)ship. But should there be more?

The film ultimately retreats into the bubble it creates. Rom-coms historically tend toward fantasy and idealization, though the best of them suggest a fervent way forward for the couples under consideration, a delirious casting off into uncharted waters that is for the characters alone to experience. The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

Production company: Valparaiso Pictures Cast:? Katie Findlay, James Sweeney, Dana Drori, James Scully, Tracie Thoms, Betsy Brandt, Randall Park Writer-director:? James Sweeney Producers:? David Carrico, Ross Putman, James Sweeney   Executive producer?: Bobby Hoppey Co-producer?: Jerry TerHorst Cinematographer: ?Greg Cotten Production designer: ?Tye Whipple Editor:? Keith Funkhouser Composer?: Logan Nelson Music supervisor?: Lauren Fay Levy Costume designer:? Neesa Martin Casting director: ?Jessica Munks Venue: Outfest Los Angeles

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Review: Love is a complicated thing in James Sweeney’s sweet, smart and funny ‘Straight Up’

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Live-action movies (for adults, that is) don’t come more adorable than “Straight Up,” a sweet, funny and thoroughly winning romantic comedy that’s a kind of a bi-curious take on “When Harry Met Sally” for the Millennial crowd — or anyone else looking for some brainy, banter-rific fun.

Writer-director-star James Sweeney has crafted a sharp and, to its credit, not always politically correct cinematic cocktail that, despite how screwball its story may sound, is more about the search for one’s soulmate — whatever their gender — than any sort of serious treatise on sexual fluidity. Still, it may take some viewers awhile to get on board with the film’s askew, slightly fairy tale-ish approach to homoflexibility, so please be patient.

Sweeney plays Los Angeles software coder and professional housesitter Todd, an obsessive-compulsive motormouth with an aversion to bodily fluids, human orifices and open-necked shirts. He thinks he may or may not be gay (he is) but decides, in his own neurotically half-baked way, that being open to dating women could seriously increase his chances of finding love — so why not give it a whirl?

There are many reasons why not, which Todd’s cynical best friends — the gorgeous, amusingly self-absorbed Meg (Dana Drori) and the sexy, out and proud Ryder (James Scully) — are all too eager to point out. (“Girls aren’t gay blind anymore,” Meg tells Todd. “This isn’t the ’60s.”) Even Todd’s equitable psychotherapist (Tracie Thoms) is dubious about his hypothetical interest in the opposite sex.

But all bets are off when Todd meets the equally bright and hyper-articulate Rory (Katie Findlay), a struggling, perhaps less-than-committed actress who can yack with him about everything from “Gilmore Girls” minutiae to Alanis Morissette lyrics (are they really “ironic”?). It’s a match made in pop culture heaven.

Todd and Rory are both lonely and looking for a romantic connection — or at least a strong emotional bond — and become fast friends. And, like a more cerebral “Will & Grace,” but with potential benefits, they’re soon ensconced in their version of domestic bliss: cooking Mongolian, watching documentaries and giving each other chaste back rubs.

Sex between them, however, proves mostly a nonstarter and they soon agree they can do without it — but can’t do without each other. Todd and Rory may be self-deluded in their own unique ways. But, like so many folks, that is more to avoid hurt and to stay locked into what passes for a comfort zone than because they completely buy what they’re selling.

Inevitably, several key, well-played moments signal “trouble ahead” for Todd and Rory’s romantic experiment. First, there’s an iconic-movie-couples costume party, in which our leads come dressed as Brick and Maggie from 1958’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” only to be repeatedly reminded that Paul Newman’s crutch-bearing hunk was considered gay — and aren’t Todd and Rory deliciously self-aware? (No, the thematic parallel allegedly escaped them.) Next, a dinner they share with Todd’s enthusiastic, if peculiar, parents (Randall Park, Betsy Brandt) is followed by a tellingly bittersweet coda. Finally, a provocative game of Truth or Dare gives Rory serious pause.

The film, niftily shot by Greg Cotten in classic Hollywood 4:3 aspect ratio (there’s also an effective use of split screen and other framing techniques), doesn’t play out in easy or predictable ways — Todd and Rory are not easy or predictable characters. But you do get the sense by the story’s tantalizing conclusion that maybe there is a path to happiness if you can just think outside the box.

Sweeney and Findlay, who’s a real find, are head-spinningly good here, juggling their torrents of dialogue with aplomb. Drori, Scully and Joshua Diaz, as Meg’s underwear model boyfriend, Zane, also provide deft comic support.

In addition, the clean, symmetrical lines of Tye Whipple’s clever production design perfectly reflect the super-tidy Todd’s need for balance and control in a world that can be disturbingly short on both.

‘Straight Up’

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

Playing: AMC Sunset 5, West Hollywood

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Metacritic reviews

Straight up.

• 80 Variety Owen Gleiberman Variety Owen Gleiberman A little of this can go a long way (the film is sometimes a bit airless), but James Sweeney is a filmmaker with the rare ability to toss antically inspired dialogue right off the edge of his brain. Straight Up is the work of a startling talent.
• 80 Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein A sweet, funny and thoroughly winning romantic comedy that’s a kind of a bi-curious take on When Harry Met Sally for the Millennial crowd — or anyone else looking for some brainy, banter-rific fun.
• 75 RogerEbert.com RogerEbert.com An assured and refreshing first feature from writer/director/star James Sweeney. With the rhythms and conventions of a traditional romantic comedy, it is refreshingly unconventional in form and content, boasting a sharp script and a gift for cinematic storytelling.
• 75 San Francisco Chronicle David Lewis San Francisco Chronicle David Lewis On the surface, Sweeney’s film is a playful examination of sexual fluidity, but underneath the gags, it’s really a universal, sweet movie about the modern complexities of finding a soulmate. It’s also a nice example of how independent films can breathe fresh air into genres like the romantic comedy.
• 67 The Film Stage Glenn Heath Jr. The Film Stage Glenn Heath Jr. Often charming in the most confrontational way possible, Straight Up pays due respect to the endlessly creative ways people delude themselves into avoiding difficult realities. It may talk (and talk) a good game, but it’s in the quieter moments of silence when it speaks volumes about the perils of modern alienation.
• 67 Austin Chronicle Austin Chronicle It only works because Sweeney and Findlay have such an incredible spark between them.
• 65 TheWrap Carlos Aguilar TheWrap Carlos Aguilar Lighthearted in tone yet intellectually intriguing, the L.A.-set film ponders valid queries about identity, even if they’re almost entirely sustained by dialogue.
• 60 The Hollywood Reporter Keith Uhlich The Hollywood Reporter Keith Uhlich The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.
• 58 IndieWire Jude Dry IndieWire Jude Dry Straight Up is meticulous in building its hyper-stylized aesthetic, but doesn’t have much to say about the human condition.
• 50 The New York Times Ben Kenigsberg The New York Times Ben Kenigsberg You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don’t sound rehearsed.
• See all 12 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for Straight Up

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