‘The Wrong Girls’ Review: Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat Stoner Comedy

Here is an incomplete list of phrases used to describe Frankie (Kristen Stewart) and/or Molly (Alia Shawkat) over the course of The Wrong Girls: Drunk dingbat. Hot-ass mess. Weird bimbos. Disposable human subjects. Dumb turkeys, dumb as rocks, dumb bitches.

In short, no one who encounters them is impressed by their capability or their intelligence, not even their own cats, and the only souls who seem to fully believe in them are one another.

But as anyone who’s ever texted their bestie the “It’s always 2 dumb bitches telling each other exactlyyyy” meme can attest, there can be great delight to be found in being utterly foolish with a likeminded friend. Proudly stupid and surprisingly sweet, Dylan Meyer’s stoner buddy comedy is a tribute to friendship best enjoyed with your own ride-or-die by your side — joints optional.

To call Molly and Frankie aimless would be, somehow, both understating the case and missing it completely.

On one hand, Frankie is a college dropout who spends her days hotboxing around Los Angeles while occasionally also delivering packages. Molly has some freelance gig involving spreadsheets, but really reserves her energy for dreaming up flavor combos only a stoner could love: brownies studded with blue cheese, raspberry smoothies swirled with toothpaste. With their combined paychecks, they’re thousands of dollars in debt, and quickly falling behind on rent.

On the other, it’s hard to look around their apartment — impeccably cramped and dirtied by production designer Katie Hickman — and not conclude these women are living their best lives, by their own off-kilter standards. The living room is overtaken by Frankie’s proudest creation, an enormous Rube Goldberg-ian device dubbed the Bong-o-Tron. The TV is mounted on the ceiling, all the better for spacing out to nature docs while lying under a thick cloud of smoke. The Casa de Chill Zone, as they call it, is a pothead paradise.

But the mellow vibes are ruined when a goofy case of mistaken identity results in Frankie coming home with a briefcase containing several vials of a glowing orange goo. From that moment on, they find themselves at the center of a global conspiracy involving a world-changing scientific discovery, an evil corporation, federal agents and a very handsome undercover known to them as “Not Metalhead Dave” (Lakeith Stanfield), for the disguise he dons the first time he meets Frankie.

Not that Molly and Frankie realize this, at least right away. The Wrong Girls channels in equal measure the amiable shagginess of stoner classics like Smiley Face and Pineapple Express and the sunny ditziness of female friendship comedies like Dick or Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. As in all those movies, the leads’ total cluelessness is part of the charm. Indifferent to the mystery of the substance — at least until they’ve swigged enough to determine they could sell it to rich idiots as a new party psychedelic — the gals are more concerned with matters like the impending closure of their favorite all-you-can-eat joint or Frankie’s hatred of Molly’s perfectly nice boyfriend, Josh (Zack Fox).

They’re oblivious to the gun-toting, hand-sanitizer-addicted henchmen trailing their every move until the shooting starts, and clueless once it does as to why all of this is happening. Though explanations don’t seem to help much, either: Even as they’re whisked before the scientist (Kate McKinnon) whose invention has started this whole mess, she can barely get a word out before Frankie and Molly are tuning her out, giggling over the fact that the big bad villain’s name is “Dr. Kock” or wondering why people from Holland are called “Dutch” and not “Hollish.”

Shawkat and Stewart are both effortlessly charming, and it’s particularly fun to see Stewart cut loose in an honest-to-god comedy. They share the lived-in chemistry of two people so in sync they’re practically speaking their own private language — and that’s before they ingest the chemical that might give them psychic powers for real. The Wrong Girls is slight in everything from its runtime (100 minutes) to its emotions (mostly chill), but Meyer packs their connection with enough backstory and texture to give it real heft. This is no casual acquaintanceship but a soul-deep bond capable of weathering any storm or earthquake or hail of bullets life might throw its way.

When they’re egging each other on, the fact that they’ve never made a normal and logical decision in their lives — even when they’re tasked with something as straightforward as finding dresses for a party, costume designer Heidi Bivens clothes them instead in repurposed Hefty bags — becomes not a weakness but a strength. “I have tracked CIA agents with more predictable movements than these girls,” one henchman remarks as the girls drunkenly stumble down an empty road, contemptuous but maybe also a tiny bit impressed.

And their friendship, a folie à deux spiral of insane ideas powered by ungodly quantities of pot, becomes akin to a superpower. It’s the sort of connection so tight it’s impenetrable to everyone else; all bemused outsiders like Not Metalhead Dave can do is sit back and wonder, “How did these girls happen to me?” But we’ve spent enough time basking in the warmth of their love to know that you can do anything at all when you’re lucky enough to have a friend who’ll look you straight in the bloodshot eye and let you know that you’re not the loser — it’s the rest of the world that lacks your imagination.