It’s safe to assume that Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne knew exactly what they were doing when they cast Dakota Johnson as the lead of Am I OK? The movie, which premiered at the virtual Sundance Film Festival last week, is a lesbian coming-of-age film written by Lauren Pomerantz, and it plays to Johnson’s strengths—being incredibly charming, adorable, and hilarious. And in fact, it’s Johnson’s copious charisma that elevates Am I OK? from a sweet but forgettable film to one that will blow up queer film Twitter when it releases on HBO Max. (Warner Bros. and HBO Max recently acquired the film, but a release date has not yet been announced.)
Johnson stars as Lucy, a 30-something woman whose life is turned upside down when her best friend Jane (Sonoya Mizuno) takes a promotion at work that will relocate her to London, thousands of miles away from Lucy in Los Angeles. Lucy can’t imagine her life without Jane—they know each other so well, that Jane knows exactly what Lucy will order when they grab a meal at a diner. But in accepting this life change, Lucy also accepts something else—she’s finally ready to admit to herself, and to Jane, that she’s gay.
Jane, who has been trying to set Lucy up with dudes for years, is thrilled by the chance to push her BFF out of her comfort zone one last time before she leaves. But while Jane wants Lucy to hook up with girls at the local lesbian bar, Lucy is interested in pursuing an ambiguous maybe-relationship with her flirty co-worker Brittany (Kiersey Clemons). The conflict, while present, is light-hearted and surface-level—Brittany is just experimenting with Lucy, Jane is too controlling, etc. It’s refreshingly sweet and almost trivial, in a way LGBTQ films rarely get to be. For Lucy, coming out is not traumatic, but it is confusing. And it’s in this uncertainty that Johnson shines.
We’ve always known that Johnson excelled at a certain brand of charming, self-deprecating comedy, ever since The Social Network when she half-heartedly insisted to Justin Timberlake that she could have died getting twisted in the shower curtain. But while the Fifty Shades franchise shot her to stardom, it wasn’t exactly a jokefest. Am I OK?, on the other hand, provides a perfect platform for Johnson to dial her charm up to the maximum level. She’s just the right blend of adorable and bumbling, from her not-so-convincing insistence that she’s fine when Jane tells her she’s moving, to her ugly crying in the restaurant bathroom less than an hour later.
“Do you know when I can visit you?” she chokes out through her drunken tears. “Like, what dates?” Johnson’s drunk acting is pitch-perfect—like when, a few drinks later, Lucy reacts to the news that Jane kissed a girl while they were in high school, by indignantly slurring, “You’ve never said those words to me before.”
Johnson also imbues Lucy with a physical hesitancy, not unlike a newborn fawn as she comes into her own in this strange new world of lesbianism. She falls off of beds and folds her body into herself, or pulls her beanie low over her ears in retreat. Your heart aches for her when you see how Lucy feels trapped inside herself, unable to make a move when that cute girl Brittany comes over, flirts, gets this close to kissing Lucy, and then suddenly flees. You can just see on Johnson’s face that Lucy is internally screaming at herself to ask Brittany to stay, but just can’t make herself say the words out loud. It’s almost unbearably endearing. Johnson fans have long suspected that she would excel at gay longing, but this is next level.
By the time the film comes to a close, there will be few viewers who haven’t fallen at least a little bit in love with Johnson. Directors Notaro and Allynne—who were married in 2015, and based the film partly on Allynne’s experience coming out in her 30s—deserve credit for so clearly understanding Johnson’s appeal, and for using her charm to their full advantage. Queer women, you are not ready.
