“The Drama” is a clever, deeply unserious movie about male panic in the guise of an edgy romantic comedy. It’s bright and shiny and aggressively nasty, and centers on a couple who meet, fall in love, become engaged and experience a relationship crisis of outlandish proportions. Screen romances tend to be catnip, and that’s certainly true in this case because the lovers are played by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, both capable, appealing performers whose beauty and natural charisma go a long way toward selling all kinds of nonsense. Their charm does a great deal of work here; it’s also the most believable thing in the movie.
Set in Boston, the story tracks the life and love of Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson), going back to their first meeting, though it largely focuses on the run-up to their wedding. Almost parodically ideal, the two are hot, young, successful professionals with interesting-sounding jobs — she works as an editor in publishing, he’s a museum curator — and have enough money for the kind of aspirationally bespoke, art-and-book-filled apartment that suggests bohemia but without the struggle. From the outside, their life looks as frictionless as any in a Nancy Meyers romantic entanglement. Of course it’s complicated (to steal one of Meyers’s titles) though in this instance all that perfection turns out to be an elaborate ruse.
The writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (“Dream Scenario”) sets up “The Drama” with crisp, borderline frenzied efficiency and an obvious acquaintance with the formal properties of the classic romantic comedy. He employs the genre’s conventions to shrewd effect, including during the couple’s comically inflected meet-cute at a bustling city cafe. There, Charlie, with conspicuous anxiety and some screwball-style bungling, approaches Emma. She’s seated alone at the counter reading a novel, “The Damage” (invented for the movie), an unsubtle warning sign that’s meant to put the viewer on alert. After some confusion — she can’t hear because she’s deaf in one ear and has an earbud in the other — the two smile and they’re off.
After the introductions, Borgli, who helped edit “The Drama,” begins toying with the timeline, gently destabilizing a story before gleefully breaking its nice little world into pieces. In short order, it’s the present day, where Charlie is going over his wedding speech with his pal, Mike (Mamoudou Athie). As Charlie voices his ardor for Emma, the story starts jumping around in time, toggling between the present and quick-sketch scenes from the past that illustrate his rhapsodic words. With Mike serving as both his witness and counsel, Charlie shares everything that he loves about Emma, including her harsh, raspy laugh. “You know how it’s very cute, but it’s also kind of,” Charlie says trailing off, prompting chortles.
Romantic comedies depend on some sort of obstacle that the lovers need to overcome on the way to their happily ever after. Some difficulties prove insurmountable, but most are merely trip hazards, like an overly demanding career or cultural differences. The ostensible obstacle in “The Drama” isn’t something as loaded and familiar as race. But it is a doozy, one that emerges while Emma and Charlie are sampling menu options at their wedding venue with Mike and his wife, Rachel (a strong Alana Haim). Amid smiles and clinking glasses, the four begin sharing the worst thing they’ve ever done, a foolish exercise that culminates in a tipsy Emma blurting out that she once came close to committing an unforgivable crime.
Emma’s confession shocks everyone at the table, and both the violence and intensity of her secret jolts the movie into a dark, queasily comedic register. Her disclosure also upends the narrative balance as a story about a romantic partnership of equals rapidly morphs into a cautionary tale about a guy freaking out over his girlfriend. While Emma weepily tries to make things right, she begins to fade in importance and Charlie and his distress take over. He isn’t just disturbed by her secret — what it may say about her, what it might portend for them — he’s unmoored. As Charlie begins spiraling emotionally, his agitation mirrors both the story’s increasingly chaotic events and Borgli’s fractured narrative approach.
Zendaya and Pattinson are both enjoyable to watch, but she’s given too little to do and he’s given too much. Once Emma makes her shocking confession, Charlie starts to obsess over her past or what he imagines it to have been, instigating a series of fantasy sequences of her as a teenager (Jordyn Curet). The choice to use two performers to play Emma makes a degree of sense, though it also means that Zendaya never gets the opportunity to develop her character with the same complexity or flamboyant expressivity that Pattinson employs with such madcap brio. Unlike Charlie, whose inner life emerges as he falls apart — his raw emotions seeping through the cracks of his being — Emma remains essentially, disappointingly unknowable.
That’s too bad because, among other reasons, it would be nice if a romantic comedy took both lovers with equal seriousness. In the end, Borgli is more interested in kinking up the narrative and tweaking the audience’s sensitivities than digging into tougher material like the nature of love. The most shocking thing about “The Drama,” though, is that despite its roguish humor, flashes of surrealism and bellicose outrageousness, it is finally an old-fashioned story about a guy, who happens to be white, consumed by his fear of a beautiful, intelligent woman who happens to be Black. That Borgli avoids engaging with race — Emma and Charlie never discuss it — is certainly a choice, one that sticks with you longer than anything else onscreen.
The Drama Rated R for images of violence. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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