Before it was even released, there was swift pushback to the Netflix acquisition Step Sisters. Despite a formidable production team behind it that includes Dear White People writer Chuck Hayward and Master of None’s Lena Waithe, the premise struck the Twitter commentariat as trite and conservative: Jamilah, a college senior hoping to gain admission to Harvard Law School, is asked by a professor to rehabilitate a group of disgraced white sorority sisters by teaching them how to step, a style of percussive dance that has its roots in African foot dancing and black sorority life. If she can pull it off, and impart upon them lessons of unity and sisterhood, the sorority will be readmitted to campus (they were punished because a sister was caught having sex on school grounds) and Jamilah will get a coveted recommendation letter to Harvard.

The movie was accused of being regressive, in that it made its black protagonist “the help” and supposedly encouraging cultural appropriation. One Twitter user, Nia Malika, wrote to Netflix: “We can’t have anything at all. None of us black sororities and fraternities are going to watch this foolishness. It’s African … Can we just have it please?”

Those involved with Step Sisters advised skeptics not to judge the movie before they see it – not exactly an argument one wants to be making before release. And Step Sisters, which comes out on Netflix today, is indeed more than its trailer lets on; the film is self-aware, honest about its racial politics, even vaguely self-referential at certain points, like when Jamilah, played by the 34-year-old actor Megalyn Echikunwoke, invokes the very phrase – “the help” – critics pre-emptively leveraged against the movie. But for all its topicality, Step Sisters is a bit underwhelming, although it makes for entertaining lite fare in the vein of Pitch Perfect or Bring It On, and the choreography is first-rate.

Hayward wrote three episodes of Netflix’s Dear White People, the first season of which was searing, funny and smart. Adapted from Justin Simien’s 2014 film of the same name, the show was, like Get Out, American Vandal and parts of Master of None, an acutely perceptive take on the zeitgeist, or at least a millennial slice of it. It wasn’t just a “woke” show, but a show about the difference between people who are woke and people who see wokeness as a sort of self-enhancing accessory, a box to be checked. This brand of hoity-toity progressivism is at its apex on liberal college campuses.

Step Sisters tries to straddle a similar line, and it has a lot to say about race, sorority life, and sisterhood, but its characters are not so much real people as mere vessels for different viewpoints, most of which the film avoids either celebrating or admonishing.

There’s Jamilah, of course, an overachiever who pretty much ditches her sorority/step-team at Westcott University to teach the sub-rhythmic white girls how to dance; there’s her boyfriend Dane, played by Matt McGorry, as a performatively woke version of himself; plus Danielle (Lyndon Smith), the tyrannical chapter head of Sigma Beta Beta and Saundra (Nia Jervier) as the only person of color in SBB; Marque Richardson from Dear White People also appears, and Robert Curtis Brown, last seen in a minor role on The Handmaid’s Tale, plays an openly gay dean who discloses far too much about his sex life to Jamilah.

I’m not sure that the ending will sufficiently address the doubts of the movie’s many naysayers. It is, after all, a pat, feelgood story, not designed to ruffle feathers. But given that its subject is no less than the campus politics of cultural appropriation, which looms large in the age of Rachel Dolezal, the hearty conclusions Step Sisters draws feel like one big cop-out, the same way you want a parent to pick a side when you’re fighting with a sibling, not tell you both to kiss and make up. This is surprising, given that the production team on Step Sisters consists of folks who contributed to more daring projects. But to enjoy the movie one would have to approach it looking for fun, a traditional underdog narrative, as opposed to, say, trenchant sociological critique. In that way, Step Sisters is, well, not so egregious a misstep.

• Step Sisters is now available on Netflix