TLDR: Maybe the rent money was the friends we made along the way.
This is your standard buddy comedy, but told through an authentically Issa lens. In subtle ways, the storyline addresses a lot of themes without ever unpacking them- which works for this movie because we don’t watch Issa Rae for her cutting-edge, on-the-nose sociological analyses of adulthood, racialization, and life under capitalism. We watch her because we like the flawed characters, the messy relationships, and the silly, yet…
Sri is the worst kind of guy - the kind who pretends to care as long as he gets what he wants - and the fact that his feigned maturity managed to dupe both mother and daughter speaks to the subtle yet profound ways that the imposition of a man’s will, in addition to the automatic deference to men’s needs, is often upheld and maintained by women in ways that are not immediately recognizable. Such is the elusive nature of identifying patriarchy-in-action. It makes slight jabs, menial advancements, pushes boundaries ever so slightly, until one day it all coalesces into instances of interpersonal violence.
