A movie like One of Them Days almost feels like a special occasion in the mid-2020s, for one because mid-budget studio comedies of its kind aren’t made very often anymore, for another because you might finish it feeling so exceptionally delighted that you immediately want to watch it again. It stars Keke Palmer, one of our funniest living actresses, and SZA, a Joni Mitchell-caliber singer-songwriter trying out acting for the first time, as Dreux and Alyssa, best friends living together in a cramped, falling-apart apartment in L.A. Both are cash-strapped — Alyssa is a multimedia artist who produces more work than she sells, and Dreux waitresses the night shift at a nearby Norms — and, when we first meet them, are fast approaching the day even those who aren’t also living paycheck to paycheck dread: the first of the month. 

Alyssa has tasked her boyfriend, Keshawn (Joshua Neal), to deliver the pair’s scrounged-together $1,500 rent to their aggressively no-nonsense landlord, Uche (Rizi Timane). But that pans out exactly how Dreux, who’s long been tired of this well-endowed leech living rent-free with her and Alyssa, would expect. Keshawn doesn’t merely snatch the money for himself: he almost immediately spends it on a nascent clothing brand he’s supposedly starting called Cucci. This all would suck less if Dreux didn’t have a potentially life-changing interview as a franchise manager at 4 p.m. she still needs to get her hair done for, and if the weather weren’t so scorching that the morning radio felt the need to comment on it. (You wouldn’t know it, though, by how much jackets and jeans outnumber classic sunny-day clothes around town.)

Uche won’t budge on his 6 p.m. due date, so the friends hit up every place they can think of for quick cash. Among the stops are a blood bank and an instant-loan place that sketchily boasts a 1,900.5% APR and that “we got you, and we’ll get you.” Alyssa and Dreux leave the former a Herschell Gordon Lewis-level bloody mess for reasons I won’t get into and the latter a place to get hysterically laughed out of for having such an eye-poppingly low combined credit score. Their car is lost along the way because of a risky parking job that doesn’t pay off. So are their clothes because of that aforementioned bloody mess. The film’s screenwriter, Syreeta Singleton, gets so many laughs out of the pair’s pit stops that it’s like she’s squeezing them all out with white-knuckle firmness. The direction by Lawrence Lamont, who’s best known for directing a few episodes of the two-season comedy series Rap Sh!t, has a confidently jaunty touch just right for comedy. (The cannily curated soundtrack, which features appearances from au courant artists like GloRilla, Doechii, and Foushée, adds to the film’s sense of race-against-time forward movement.) 

Verbal and physical comedy are generously supplied in One of Them Days, though for a born-to-be-a-movie-star performer like Palmer the two can sometimes feel very nearly one and the same. Designated as the straight man in this movie’s odd couple, she has so many noises — I can’t stop thinking about one early nervous swallow she barely conceals in front of a crush — and microexpressions at her disposal that she can make, say, the putty-faced Jim Carrey look uninventively obvious. As the duo’s heart-over-head goofball, SZA is also unexpectedly a skillful comedy performer — something notoriously not easy to be — and she seems to be having a good time with this character unsubtly poking some light fun at the persona she’s cultivated in her music: a little spacey, very in tune with her feelings, not safe from getting screwed over by men who don’t treat her how she should be. (It sounded like a SZA lyric to me when Alyssa earnestly asks, for instance, “Can’t you tell I’m lost?”) The supporting characters are just as pivotal to the film’s comic sturdiness; cameos from Katt Williams, Janelle James, and Keyla Monterroso Mejia made me want to cheer. 

Watching One of Them Days, I kept flashing back to Smiley Face (2007), a low-budget comedy where a hilarious Anna Faris devoured a plateful of pot-laced cupcakes and had to complete the day’s tasks while unpersuasively pretending like her eyes, mouth, and brain weren’t drooping for the bewildered sober people around her. Even if Alyssa is portrayed as a spiritual type who might smoke the stuff to get better attuned to the universe, One of Them Days isn’t a stoner comedy. But it shares Smiley Face’s odyssey-style narrative, indispensably funny performers, and knack for turning mundane situations into believably chaotic settings in which you never know what will happen but you’re sure you’ll probably belly laugh. I want to go to the theaters more often for movies like Smiley Face and One of Them Days: assuredly made comedies where the ambitions are not much more than being very funny and they succeed so forcefully that they feel like something more momentous. I hope One of Them Days does as well at the box office as I imagine it will be so that we get more like it.