The tone of Crazy Rich Asians co-screenwriter Adele Lim’s directorial debut, Joy Ride, is more accurately conveyed by its working title, The Joy Fuck Club. The film falls squarely in the recent tradition of “women behaving badly” comedies like Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids and Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls Trip, with a handful of gut-busting, outrageous comic set pieces that push the boundaries of good taste. But alongside all the coke-fueled, outlandish sexual escapades and vagina tattoo jokes that allow Joy Ride’s four leads to smash the stereotype of the quiet, submissive Asian woman, we also get a heartfelt, if sometimes clunky, tale of cultural heritage and belonging that heads in surprising, and surprisingly complicated, directions.
The film initially follows Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola), childhood best friends who were also the only two Asian kids in White Falls, Washington. An early flashback neatly establishes their good girl/bad girl dynamic when Audrey (Isla Rose Hall), who’s adopted by white parents and new to town, cowers when a boy at the playground hurls a racial slur her way, only for Lolo (Chloe Pun) to tell him to fuck off and knock him out with a single punch. Needless to say, the two are bonded by this moment, as well as by their shared status as outsiders.
Flash forward 25 years and Audrey and Lolo are still close, but Audrey is eyeing moving to L.A. and make partner at her law film, which would leave Lolo, a sex-positive artist living in her friend’s guest house, behind by her lonesome in White Falls. It’s then that Joy Ride’s comic chops shift into the next gear when Audrey, who tricked her boss into believing she’s fluent in Mandarin, heads to China to close a business deal. She invites Lolo, who in turn secretly invites her friendless, persistently online cousin, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), to tag along, and the trio soon meet up with Audrey’s old college roomie, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a rising actress in China.
The group’s interpersonal dynamic, with Lolo and Kat viciously vying to be Audrey’s true bestie and Deadeye awkwardly trying to keep the peace, allows the film to more easily explore different types of friendships and how they can morph in new settings. But at the center of the narrative is Audrey confronting her understanding of where she came from and who she is. Her friends often tease her about her basically being a white girl, as evidenced by her fondness for Mumford & Sons and the National. And when Lolo forces her to go looking for her birth mother, Audrey is thrown into a full-blown crisis of identity that tests all of her relationships.
While the film is more than a little uneven, with scenes of over-the-top physical comedy awkwardly giving way to more dramatic and sentimental moments between its characters, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao’s script is marked by a certain confidence in its cultural specificity. And while the film addresses the challenges that Asian-American women face in the U.S., it wisely elides preachiness as it both celebrates and lovingly pokes fun at the diversity of a subculture of the population that’s often presented as monolithic.
Joy Ride certainly represents a win for representation, but it never forgets that it’s a comedy first. It finds creative ways to fuse some of its most memorable comic sequences, such as a K-pop rendition of “WAP,” with clever cultural observations, lending it a quiet intelligence that’s never completely snuffed out even during its most outrageous and confrontational scenes.
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