‘Shortcomings’: Winning performances carry film across the finish line - The Washington Post
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‘Shortcomings’: Winning performances carry film across the finish line

Randall Park makes an auspicious debut behind the camera, with Justin H. Min delivering a breakout performance in front of it

Review by
Sherry Cola, left, and Justin H. Min in “Shortcomings.” (Jon Pack/Sony Pictures Classics)
3 min
(2.5 stars)

Actor Randall Park makes his solo feature debut as a director with “Shortcomings,” a sharply observed dramedy smartly adapted for the screen by Adrian Tomine, based on his own acclaimed 2007 graphic novel. Revolving around a character we’ve seen all too often before — a 30-ish slacker who can’t seem to figure out what he wants in life, professionally or romantically — the slight and more than slightly familiar film earns equal measures of gravitas, likability and surprise from its central performance.

Justin H. Min plays Ben, by night the manager of a Berkeley movie theater and by day a filmmaker in name only, who spends his off hours re-streaming classic movies for the umpteenth time and complaining about mainstream Hollywood fare — even those newer films that center on Asian characters, as this one does. He lives with girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki), who is so obviously wrong for him (and vice versa) that she jumps at the chance to take an extended internship in New York after catching Ben searching a porn website specializing in non-Asian women. For his part, Ben uses the newfound freedom to explore his apparent fetishization of such European blondes as the new cashier at his theater (Tavi Gevinson) and a bisexual woman he meets at a party (Debby Ryan).

Throughout it all, he’s charmingly confused, bouncing his confusion off his gay best friend Alice, played with a mix of sardonic wit and helpless affection for him by the marvelous Sherry Cola of “Joy Ride.”

As delivered by Min, Ben’s psychological, emotional and sexual chaos is not as annoying as it sounds. Rather, it all feels very genuine, even perversely beguiling — surely a benefit of Min’s own charisma. Best known for his roles in the ensemble cast of the Netflix show “The Umbrella Academy,” in which he portrayed a teenage superhero who can release tentacles from his abdomen, and in the art house sci-fi flick “After Yang,” where he played a kind of robot butler, Min breaks out here with a far more down-to-earth and human character. Let’s hope we see more of this side of Min, however flawed Ben may be, in the future.

The character of Miko is out of the picture for much of the story, save for the film’s opening and the climax, in which Ben is forced to face his own, well, shortcomings. So the narrative relies almost entirely on the dynamic generated between Ben and Alice. Under Park’s capable hand, their kvetching intimacy, which at times has almost the energy of a two-hander, feels unexpectedly fresh, real, unforced and satisfying — closer to the heartwarming raunch of “Joy Ride” than the wish-fulfillment fantasy of “Crazy Rich Asians” (a film of the genre Ben so gleefully disses).

If “Shortcomings” falls short in any way — hackneyed plot, halfhearted themes of assimilation and identity — it isn’t due to the two actors who carry the story across the finish line.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language throughout, sexual material and brief nudity. 94 minutes.