You know you are on to a good thing when somewhere during the rollicking ride, a surprise cameo sneaks in to steal the whole show from the leads.
This happens about 45 minutes into One Of Them (sic.) Days when our two broke heroines Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alissa (SZA) visit a loan company. Over there, the lady at the counter (played by Keyla Monterroso Mejia) has a solid laugh when she sees their credit scores.
It is not cruel laughter. It is the laughter of acceptance, of even amusement, an acknowledgment of how desperate moneyless, and barzen, people can be. The actress sums up the amusement we feel rise in our abdomen watching this pair in their despair. We know these two will do anything to tide over their financial crisis, and they don’t disappoint. Never!
Dreux and Alissa are as desperate as it can get. Dreux is a waitress fed up of serving trashy thankless customers. Alissa is a painter whose paintings nobody buys (at least now while the fun lasts), not because she is no good but because she is not known (quite like this film itself which commands attention without marquee names).
The two girls are about to be evicted by the kindly but not stupid landlord unless they pay their rent.
The rent becomes the bone of contention in a series of desperate measures, one funnier than the other. After a point—the point where Alissa climbs an electric pole to extricate a pair of expensive sneakers from the live wires— I stopped trying to keep track of these two women’s mortifying sometimes monstrously messy (check out the blood donation sequence) antics that range from the strange to the outright deranged.
Strapping the layers of zany adventures into one baggy mass of mirthful messiness, are the actors, both big and small, they get our attention for their dedication to the bedlam. The two leads are a perfect combo of crazy and crazier (like pizza and cola). But the rest of the cast too just glitters. Special mention of Maude Apatow as Bethany the only major White character in the building who tries hard to be assimilative and is severely satirized for her efforts.
There is so much that One Of Them Days tells us about life on the financially unstable side of the street and how benign laughter can be, even when directed at the hapless.
