★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Just another broke-Black-girls comedy? Ha! Only if you’re not paying attention. “One of Them Days” earned four nominations for the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards, including Best First Feature, Best Lead Performance (Keke Palmer), Best Breakthrough Performance (SZA), and Best First Screenplay (Syreeta Singleton), making it one of the most recognized indie films of the year. And it deserves all the attention it’s getting, right up there with “Peter Hujar’s Day” and “Eephus,” the other two Spirit nominees I’m spotlighting this week.
Just watch as two livewire actresses turn a bare-bones plot into a scaffolding for world and character building. Keke Palmer is lit-fuse dynamite as Dreux, a waitress eager to turn manager, and SZA matches her as Alyssa, a wannabe artist mired in struggle. They’re besties and roomies in an opposite of luxury apartment in Baldwin Village, Los Angeles, known as The Jungles for a reason. Like a large and growing chunk of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, these two industrious Black girls are being threatened with eviction by Uche (Rizi Timane), a landlord whose middle name should be “shakedown.”
Just another broke-Black-girls comedy? Ha! Only if you’re not paying attention.
The upshot is they need to raise $1500 in rent money in a single day or else. Dreux and Alyssa can laugh off a lot, but not this. Mistakes have been made, like Alyssa trusting her boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal), a walking, talking definition of untrustworthy, to get the rent money to Uche.
That’s a plan that’s built to backfire, so it’s up to Dreux and Alyssa to find another $1500 by 6pm. That’s just eight hours to avert disaster and Dreux has a job interview at 4pm. It sure is one of them days. But these two divas hit the ground running, starting with a loan shark (with their credit scores it’s no go), then selling blood (more splatter here than in a horror movie), then hawking a pair of Air Jordans they find slung over a power line (a good deal until they find a drug kingpin owns them).
The dazzling comic teamwork of Palmer and SZA make these exploits gut-busting hilarious. Until they don’t. Until reality sets in and Dreux and Alysaa need to find a way out that can earn them a reprieve and the possibility of a real future. That they do in ways I’ll never spoil is a tribute to their independence, unflagging enterprise and an aura of good feeling and friendship that permeates the movie from first scene to last.
That generosity of spirit which extends to characters you might love to hate. They include a white girl Instagram influencer, Bethany (Maude Apatow, the talented daughter of Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann) , who moves into Dreux and Alyssa’s building as a dreaded symbol of gentrification and ends up being treated with a warmth you won’t see coming.
Sharing credit with Palmer and SZA for this slapstick free-for-all with a sneaky social conscience is a creative team that dodges the usual dead spots and wrong turns into inane farce. Produced by Issa Rae, and directed and written, respectively, by first-timers Lawrence Lamont and Syreeta Singleton, both of whom collaborated with Rae on “Insecure” and “Rap Shit,” this movie climbs to absurd comic heights without ever skimping on the human vulnerabilities that make the adventures of Dreux and Alyssa so raw and relatable.
When “One of Them Days” first opened early in the year, it touched a nerve, especially with Black ticket buyers, that kept it running in theaters for months, a real accomplishment in a time when indie releases rarely show staying power. Now that “One of Them Days” is available on Netflix, more audiences can see what made the Spirit Awards so eager to get the word out about this femcentic powerhouse. For once, the hype is justified.