One Night Only

The Black List, in the Hollywood realm, is an annual survey of the “most liked” screenplays that have yet to be set up for production, and One Night Only was at the top of that list in 2024. On the one hand, it’s easy to see why: Travis Braun is a skilled writer who produces clever, believable dialogue and likable characters, and who has a knack for inventing potentially funny situations.

On the other hand, there’s the absurd premise that hangs over the movie: The United States has outlawed all extramarital sex, using implanted biometric monitors as enforcement. The “one night” of the title is a 12-hour window, occurring once a year, when “the mandate,” as it’s called, is suspended. Our protagonists, Owen and Allie, literally run into one another on the sidewalk early on, then spend the rest of the movie finding reasons to hook up with anyone but each other.

So, One Night Only is both a boy-meets-girl romantic comedy and a dystopian movie, as if Anyone But You was set in the world of The Purge. Except not really, because Braun — and the director, Will Gluck (Anyone But You) — has no interest in how the mandate came to be or what it means for this barely imagined society or, really, anything dystopian. This is Brooklyn, New York, in 2026 with a giant cock block imposed to provide a kind of funny, kind of horrifying premise to motivate everything that happens. It’s like the setup for a joke with no punch line. It’s all set up.

It’s little wonder moviegoers don’t know what to make of it (industry press has declared it a box office “flop”). The two leads, British hunk Callum Turner (Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore) and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown), are charming and well-matched, even if their characters repeatedly make dumb decisions. For example: Owen agrees to hook up with a woman in a deserted park; Allie, a jingles singer, goes home with a fellow musician of dubious character; both Owen and Allie thereby wind up naked, or nearly so, and outdoors.

There are a lot of comic bits, mostly silly, about condoms, which are legally required during the mandate hiatus and are therefore in short supply. There’s a foul-mouthed 12-year-old whom Allie’s sensible lesbian roommate (Quintessa Swindell) is babysitting for $5,000 so the kid’s mom can go out and have sex. There’s Maya Hawke as Owen’s maybe-ex-girlfirend. There are cameos by Pete Davidson and Bobby Cannavale (as themselves), Este Haim and Ziwe (as door guards at a swanky club), and Nicholas Braun (The Sheep Detectives), seemingly riffing on his Succession co-stars. Best of all, there are Molly Ringwald, as Owen’s mom, and LeVar Burton, as mom’s paramour, who have a few of the movie’s better scenes.

When the ridiculousness abates now and then, as in the late-in-the-film scene between Owen and Allie in Owen’s empty pizzeria, Turner and Barbaro make the most of it, providing what charm the movie has, courtesy of Braun’s admirable dialogue. The ending is both satisfying and head-scratching, as it plays into the “mandate” premise — as if such an intrusive, destructive law was no more important than, say, going to separate colleges.

To enjoy the movie, therefore, you need both to accept the premise, which drives the comedy (there are some laugh-out-loud moments), and ignore it in order to connect with the much-less-complicated ballad of Owen and Allie. My takeaway was that I’d be happy to see Callum and Barbaro in a less contrived romance, and that Ringwald could still headline a comedy if anyone would let her.

Oh, and some screenplays should just remain on The Black List, where they might be better appreciated.

Grade: B-minus. Now playing at AMC River Hills, Carolina Cinemark, the Fine Arts Theatre, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Universal Pictures)