‘All About Nina,’ a Funny Lady (With Issues)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead suckers you right into “All About Nina.” As Nina Geld, a stand-up with an attractively pugnacious persona and a stated preference for hookups, Winstead makes unruliness into a female virtue, an offensive strategy that is also a good defense. Leading with a sly smile, she easily talks dirty but also lets you see the fissures in Nina’s demonstrative belligerence, making you wonder where real life ends and the act begins. Winstead is so good that she even shows you the movie that could have been, one without the clichés and therapy talk.

Written and directed by Eva Vives, making her ragged feature debut, the movie follows Nina as she tries to kick-start her floundering life. Her career seems to have stalled out, and her guy du jour (Chace Crawford) is an abusive jerk. She should call the cops on him, but doesn’t, perhaps because he’s on the force himself. There’s nothing much keeping her in New York, so she heads to Los Angeles, where she finds a world of la-la land clichés that are never as funny as they should be. (“I need trees around me, I’m water based,” a gaga Angeleno, played by Kate del Castillo,announces with a vibe that could be friendly or merely nuts.)

“All About Nina” is a story of self-discovery (and self-care) that rests uneasily at the very jammed crossroads of comedy, drama, romance and self-actualization. An early scene with the abusive guy she can’t fully quit makes it apparent that Nina has some serious things she needs to work out, which she does with brittle jokes, some begrudgingly observed life lessons and a new, rapidly deployed romance. The new guy, Rafe (Common), isn’t a fast closer, but when the story throws him together with Nina it’s instantly evident from the flirty talk (and from Common’s star status) where they are headed. After the usual wining, dining and sharing, Nina reconsiders her allegiance to hookups, having found a seemingly perfect dude.

The two actors are an attractive but unpersuasive fit, though their shared awkwardness dissipates after Nina and Rafe get stoned in his picture-perfect pad. Once they’re high, they calm down (and so do the actors). They talk, naturally, lazily, discovering each other with words and laughs. Vives’ visual choices are largely generic (they’re made worse by the dingy digital), but here she places the camera above the characters so that it points directly down at them. Nina and Rafe are supine on the floor with their heads next to each other, but they’re also lying in opposite directions, which suits the exploratory stage of their liaison.

It’s hard not to root for Nina, even if this prickly, intriguingly difficult character becomes considerably less interesting as the story progresses and the dialogue veers toward the therapeutic. (Nina gradually takes to the city’s healing ways.) There’s a lot of material to be found in the world of the female comic, as Vives and Winstead make clear. Watching Nina work hard at being a professionally funny woman is satisfying, whether she’s trying out new material in her empty apartment or staring into a mirror trying out her impressions (Celine Dion, Cher). Like too many American filmmakers, however, Vives weighs down her protagonist with a traumatic past that is just too heavy for a movie that otherwise often settles for glib.

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