Written and directed by its star Tom Malloy, this low-budget comedy is likably offbeat, full of tiny kinks in every sense, with mildly surprising plot twists and supporting characters who are into threesomes, S&M, and so on. But it’s also fully conventional in that like the vast majority of romcoms it sets out to assemble a heterosexual couple and eventually succeeds. The core romance is sutured when Malloy’s Jack and Briana Evigan’s Jill, two ordinary normcore singletons who both love proper ballroom dancing and swing, finally get to dance together at the climax. Honestly, it’s so brazenly obvious in following every rule of genre that it’s barely a spoiler to reveal it: the fun is in how they get there.
Naturally, the course of true love sputters and stalls along the way. In the opening scene, they don’t actually meet at the local dance club where Jill likes to go with her friend Patrick (Mario Cantone from Sex and the City), a gay man who’s happy to pretend to be her husband to swat away unwanted dance partners. But Jill is impressed when she sees Jack, a former ballroom dance instructor recovering from a divorce, busting a move with his friend Samantha (Julianne Arrieta). Jack and Jill miss getting introduced by minutes, a pattern satisfyingly reprised throughout – although their respective hopes are raised when both of them encounter (separately of course) a crazy cat lady on a bridge who predicts they will each find true love by the end of the year – which happens to be in a week’s time. Encouraged by different friends who all end up being guests at a wedding by the end, Jack and Jill go on a series of comically awful dates with people to whom they are quite unsuited.
If that all sounds a bit corny, well, yes, it is – but Malloy writes reasonably sparky dialogue and it’s nice to see so many unfamiliar faces having fun with the kooky characters assigned to them. And most of them turn out to be great dancers. Evigan, who starred in a couple of the Step Up films, is probably the best known of the lot and she projects a sweet-natured social awkwardness throughout, especially when on dates with strange guys like a high-school chemistry teacher who finds her jocular mention of Breaking Bad offensive.
• Ask Me to Dance is released on 13 February on digital platforms.
