“Girls Will be Girls” plays out like a shticky, vulgar sitcom in which the featured characters are bitchy stereotypes. One of them says, “I know my looks are starting to go,” and another one replies, “Honey, your looks are home and in bed.” That’s about how it goes.
The gimmick is that all three female leads are played by men, in rather astoundingly good get-ups. (I honestly thought the main character, Evie, was a woman until I read the cast list.) It’s full drag campiness, performed by acid-tongued vixens who, alas, have only one joke in them: Hollywood bitches are funny!
Evie (Jack Plotnick) is an aging B-list actress who drinks like a fish and will have sex with any man she can get her hands on. Her roommate, Coco (Clinton Leupp), bears the brunt of Evie’s verbal abuse, but she is oblivious. She only wants to have a baby, and to reconnect with the handsome doctor who performed her abortion so many years ago.
Their lives are disrupted when Varla (Jeffery Roberson) gets off the bus from the Midwest, seeking stardom. She somehow comes to live with Evie and Coco, and Evie is instantly jealous of her potential success. Catty conniving commences from there.
The cartoon-colorful sets are a visual treat, and match well the film’s attitude, which is two-dimensional at the most. The jokes are almost vaudevillian: There’s a set-up, then a punch line. Varla asks if people are still “discovered” in a certain L.A. spot, and Evie replies, “Yes, but mostly in the men’s room, by undercover cops.”
There is also a truly hilarious scene from “Asteroid,” a bad disaster movie Evie once appeared in but for which she could not seem to learn her lines.
Aside from that and a few scattered chuckles, the film is intent on playing its one note over and over again. It seems like nothing more than one episode of a sitcom — fine if there are 22 episodes a year, but if this is the only one, shouldn’t it be better?
D+ (1 hr., 22 min.; )
