Adrift in her mid-twenties after breaking up with her longtime boyfriend Josh (Nicholas Braun), Alice (Dakota Johnson) takes a clerical job at a law firm in New York City. There, she befriends her foul-mouthed, party-girl co-worker Robin (Rebel Wilson), who, while extraordinarily sexually active, has little interest in settling down for a relationship. Robin soon makes it her mission to show Alice the benefits of the single life through a series of flirtations, hookups, and hangover recoveries. Meanwhile, Alice's older sister Meg (Leslie Mann) is committed to her career as a delivery nurse and is dead set against marriage, children, or any form of codependency. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Lucy (Alison Brie), who carries around marriage-planning books and has created an algorithm for ten different dating websites in order to find the most desirable matches. These four women, with their vastly different perceptions of relationships and love, attempt to navigate the bachelorette life of New York City in director Christian Ditter's romantic comedy How to Be Single.
A host of suitors arise, fizzle out, and spring back up in this rom com adapted from Sex and the City writer Liz Tuccillo's 2008 novel of the same name. The ebb and flow of the relationships in this movie certainly ring true, but the central characters' cathartic, oversimplified epiphanies really don't. Single could have stuck to being an unabashed romantic comedy of errors, but instead it tries to reach for profundity via ham-fisted depictions of personal breakthroughs. The result is a sometimes funny, frequently corny, and overall unremarkable attempt to quantify love in the 21st century.
Johnson is outfitted with the millennial-urbanite starter pack: a Williamsburg walk-up apartment, enough pairs of overalls to start a garden co-op, a beach-cruiser bike for quick jaunts across the bridge into Manhattan, and even a copy of The Bell Jar to read on her fire escape. Despite the surface similarities to the characters on Girls, Johnson is able to inject some life into Alice; it would be a shame if her career were overshadowed by the Fifty Shades franchise, because she shows she's capable of more than that here (despite working with a script that desperately needed a few more revisions).
Wilson overplays her party-girl routine to a disappointing degree -- even worse, most of her physical bits of comedy exist to mock her appearance. Mann is serviceable, even if her character eventually has a realization that is completely at odds with everything we're told about her. Brie is underutilized as the neurotic single with baby fever, and it's never made clear what connection, if any, she has with the other three women, apart from sharing a mutual acquaintance with hunky bartender Tom (Anders Holm of Workaholics fame).
Despite focusing on Robin's sexual freedom, Meg's career-mindedness, Lucy's Internet savvy, and Alice's independence, How to Be Single never gets close to offering a nuanced analysis of modern romance. While the conclusion of the film hints at the possibility that Alice has found contentment, all of these characters -- male and female -- are far too concerned with the destination of their single lives to glean any knowledge from the journey. But if you're looking for chick-flick material, there are much worse options than this.