Amusing and fitfully insightful, Randall Park’s ‘Shortcomings’ has a few of its own

One of the self-owning charms of “Shortcomings,” Randall Park’s modest, sporadically insightful directing debut, is that it’s an Asian American comedy that questions (at least initially) the inherent value of Asian American comedies. It begins at a film-festival screening of a glossy romantic comedy that suggests a ChatGPT rewrite of “Crazy Rich Asians” (starring a very game Stephanie Hsu and Ronny Chieng). The crowd laps it up, but at least one unsmiling audience member, Ben (Justin H. Min), bites his tongue — for now, anyway. Once outside the theater, he starts venting to his girlfriend, Miko (Ally Maki), about the uncritical mind-set of their fellow Asian American moviegoers, who clearly will embrace any pandering Hollywood mediocrity simply for checking off their preferred representational box.

Miko pushes back, arguing that even an imperfect film centering nonwhite voices has its obvious uses. But let’s give the counter-argument its due: What we see of the movie in question does look pretty lousy, and Ben surely would be entitled to his cine-snobbery even if it didn’t suit his job description (aspiring filmmaker turned manager of a crumbling Bay Area art-house theater).

Then again, even if Ben has a point, that’s part of the problem. Moment by moment, he’s nothing but points; he’s all sharp edges and prickly rhetorical jabs. To call him a jerk would be an understatement, and understatement is a skill he could stand to learn.

And “Shortcomings,” closely adapted by Adrian Tomine from his 2007 graphic novel of the same title, certainly means to teach its protagonist a thing or two. For Miko, the flare-up is merely the latest demonstration of Ben’s unearned superiority, as well as his refusal to countenance feelings and perspectives that don’t align with his own. His insistence that representation doesn’t really matter often feels like a conveniently self-serving canard, since Ben is nothing if not painfully self-conscious about his own identity (like Miko, he’s Japanese American), especially as it affects his interactions with the opposite sex. It hasn’t escaped Miko’s notice that Ben has a preference for white women, something he denies even as his wandering eye and tastes in internet porn betray him.

Ally Maki and Justin H. Min in the movie “Shortcomings.”

(Jon Pack / Sony Pictures Classics)

So you can’t really fault Miko’s decision to put this increasingly unhappy relationship on hold and take a three-month internship in New York City. That leaves us to bum around the Bay Area with Ben and also, more happily, his sharp-tongued best friend, Alice (Sherry Cola), a queer Korean American woman who turns out to be the better half of this movie’s true (and platonic) love story. Mostly, though, Ben mopes around watching Cassavetes, Ozu and Rohmer, reprimands his fellow losers and burnouts at the movie theater, and tries to catch the attention of (no points for guessing) white women.

First up is a younger co-worker, Autumn (Tavi Gevinson), who invites Ben to her pseudo-edgy experimental art shows; his enthusiastic reaction confirms he isn’t always the unapologetic truth-teller he pretends to be. Ben fares better with Sasha (Debby Ryan), who’s just broken off a relationship with a woman (“She’s a fence-sitter!” warns Alice). But even their sweet, tentative romance, predicated on mutual curiosity and real attraction, can’t help but bring out Ben’s ugly side, from his reflexive self-pity to his objectifying, self-loathing assumptions about interracial coupledom. That lays a creaky foundation for the movie’s third-act shift to New York, where a twisty, painful but necessary reckoning with Miko looms.

Apart from some minor 2023-appropriate upgrades (Ben’s porn proclivities are exposed by an open internet browser, not a “Sapphic Sorority” DVD), all this plays out more or less as it did in its source material. You could call that faithfulness or fidelity, but in the context of “Shortcomings,” it also reads as an excess of timidity, a failure of nerve. Tomine’s compact, easily digestible story — segmented here into even more easily digestible chapters, complete with cutesy pastel-hued title cards — moves along pleasingly enough but hasn’t been given the vigorous comic reimagination it cries out for. (For an example of how intelligently Tomine’s work can translate to the screen, check out “Paris, 13th District,” Jacques Audiard’s dizzyingly romantic adaptation of three Tomine short stories.)

Justin H. Min and Tavi Gevinson in the movie “Shortcomings.”

(Sony Pictures Classics)

Park, a popular actor and comedian whose credits include “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Always Be My Maybe” and a small chunk of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, proves unsurprisingly good with his cast. (That includes Timothy Simons as a Japanese-fluent, martial-arts-skilled, orientalist-art-collecting “rice king” who gets under Ben’s skin.) As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments. It doesn’t help that much of the dialogue, so dryly understated on the page, has been underlined and punched up in search of belly laughs that never quite arrive.

The laughs that do land tend to involve Cola, who, between this and “Joy Ride,” is clearly the summer’s unofficial best-friend MVP. A piss-taker par excellence, Alice consistently puts Ben in his place, something he and the movie badly need; her blunt, cutting appraisals, even when they’re spot-on, can’t help but tease out Ben’s softer side. Min’s charisma, of course, plays its part: Versatile enough to play both a sweet-souled cyborg in “After Yang” and a conniving churchgoer in “Beef,” he excavates the struggling soul beneath the sour misanthropy and insufferable ego.

Ben does, at the end of the day, just want to be loved, though he’ll settle for being liked. The same is true of “Shortcomings,” which is nothing if not likable, amusing and even pointed in ways that it’s too quick to soften. Its parting gesture, which sounds an echo of its opening scene, feels like a particularly disingenuous bid for uplift, as if it were trying to not just understand but also silence and apologize for Ben’s abrasive truth-telling. It’s a similar spirit of ruthless honesty that forces me to confess: I still like “Crazy Rich Asians” better.