Ashley Park and Leighton Meester in Fizzy Buddy Comedy

There are two types of people in the world: Those who’ll admit to looking up their partner’s exes on social media and those who are lying. Basic, Chelsea Devantez’s expansion of her own 2020 short, builds itself around this embarrassing but universal truth. Following a brokenhearted woman whose obsession with her ex’s ex comes to a head one lemon-drop-fueled night, the comedy serves tragically relatable laughs all the way into some genuine (if hardly groundbreaking) wisdom.

In Ingrid Goes West fashion, our early introduction to Gloria (Ashley Park) is of her lying in the dark, furiously scrolling through Instagram posts by the impeccably dressed Kailynn (Leighton Meester), apparently a model-pretty influencer clad in flashy dresses or tiny bikinis. Emphasis on furiously: Gloria’s internal monologue swings between imagining Kailynn’s perspective in the most mocking tone she can muster and bitterly picking her apart for being vain, vapid and, above all, basic.

Kailynn is the ex-girlfriend of Nick (Taylor John Smith), who’s none too thrilled when he wakes in the middle of the night to find his current girlfriend fixating on his old one. When Gloria refuses to let it go, Nick kicks her to the curb. One 6 a.m. pit stop for vodka and Totino’s pizza rolls later (“Don’t witness me,” she mutters to the cashier), Gloria’s back at her own place, sobbing into pints of melted ice cream.

The first act of Basic is a whirlwind, not dissimilar to the experience of anxiously flicking through a TikTok FYP in search of answers to questions you can’t quite articulate. Devantez hops between Gloria’s narration of Kailynn’s feed, flashbacks to Gloria’s childhood, flashbacks to her happier days with Nick, Gloria’s imagined flashbacks of Kailynn’s relationship with Nick, and Gloria’s actual present-day reality so rapidly that past, present, reality and fiction blur into one another. If the frenzied tone is fitting for Gloria’s mental state, it’s also exhausting to watch.

But just when Basic threatens to feel like too much, it makes an intriguing pivot. Certain that Kailynn has been sleeping with Nick, Gloria pounds back some liquor and puts on her hottest going-out top to confront the homewrecker in person. But the Kailynn she finds hosting trivia at a local bar isn’t what she, and we, have come to expect.

The real Kailynn is not some pampered influencer but a struggling comedian (and a pretty funny one, to Gloria’s great annoyance). She’s also something of a girl’s girl — enough, at least, to volunteer to take a very sloshed Gloria home because “There’s a special place in hell for women who let drunk women go home alone” and, she quips, she’s destined for the hell reserved for women who watch daddy porn.

After a thrilling detour into Kailynn’s own perspective (“The best revenge isn’t living well. It’s this,” she gloats when she sees how jealous Gloria is), Basic mellows into something like an odd-couple buddy comedy, as the route back to Gloria’s winds through drag night at a cocktail bar, grilled cheese sandwiches at an all-night hole in the wall, and an impromptu skateboarding lesson and photoshoot.

Is it a bit of a cliché that each woman eventually realizes the other is more complicated than she’d assumed from scouring Yelp reviews and Venmo histories? Sure. Is it predictable that they come to see they have more in common than not, including a self-sabotaging fear of romantic betrayal and an appreciation for the soothing power of Zoloft? Probably. Is it anything all that revolutionary to conclude, as Basic eventually does, that one’s dating history is not to be repudiated but embraced as part of what makes a person who they are? Nah.

But does Basic ever stop being a blast? Also no. It’s simply fun to hang with Kailynn and Gloria as they bicker about which one of them is the real bitch and, relatedly, whether “bitch” is an offensively outdated term or a coolly outdated one. Or to watch Gloria, whom Kailynn correctly diagnoses as having few friends, blossom as she’s brought into Kailynn’s tight-knit circle (including Ashley Nicole Black, Kandy Muse and Kenzie Elizabeth). Theirs is the kind of evening that comes only rarely but that you treasure when it does, when stepping out of your ordinary life helps you see it from a fresher, clearer perspective.

Basic‘s two leading ladies do much to sell the unexpected delight. As seen in films like Joy Ride, Park has a knack for making the most over-the-top comedy feel grounded in something believable. Her performance of Gloria’s paranoia and post-break-up blues might go hilariously big — she never whispers when she can shout or weeps prettily when she can sob noisily — but there’s real vulnerability coursing underneath. And Meester is perfectly cast as both the shallow dream girl of Gloria’s imagination and the earthier, wryer, sadder woman she turns out to be.

The pair are great fun to watch together, and certainly share more interesting chemistry with each other than either does with Nick, who, as played by Smith, is exactly the handsome blank slate he needs to be and not much more. At times, I found myself wishing the film might borrow a page from Ariana Grande’s “Break Up With Your Girlfriend” video, and ditch the dude entirely in favor of their feisty feminine chemistry.

I don’t think it’s any big spoiler to say it doesn’t. But as Basic is here to remind us, these moments of human connection matter — even when they don’t always lead to some big romantic happily ever after.