Am I OK?

I thought Am I OK? was about a woman realizing in her thirties that she’s a lesbian and that this realization came mostly from Googling “Am I a lesbian?”. I thought it was a comedy, and it is, in a way, but it’s also about more than being funny and more even than coming out. It’s about friendship — the give and take of it, what we owe to the people we love and who love us in an everyday kind of way. 

At first, I was a little wary about the movie because the White protagonist’s best friend is Asian and her love interest is Black, and I wondered if both of these characters were going to be in service to the White main character, as people of color in films are often made to be. I wondered if they were going to easily guide the way for the White main character, to be what she needed them to be—not quite human in the sense that they are not allowed to be messy or complicated or selfish themselves. 

I think it’s become so normal to have people of color in mainstream films shell out emotional support that we don’t always notice it anymore, much less know how to ask instead for characters who can look inward and realize that what they want is not always what the people around them want, and that’s okay. (That’s good actually, that is in fact being a person with recognizable boundaries.)

I was wary because this White main character has a propensity to cry (like a lot), and she’s kind of quiet and dainty, and if you don’t identify with her then it’s sort of awkward to watch her at times. She is, for most of the film, self-absorbed but what makes this movie different than most other movies with a self-absorbed White protagonist is that the film itself isn’t only from her point-of-view. It’s able to look around and see the other characters living their lives outside of her, sometimes living their lives in direct contradiction to hers, like her best friend, who is going to move to London for work (who’s excited about this!), even though this White woman has just realized she’s gay and needs her. 

And then it unfolds even more from there: Her best friend is dating a Black guy, and even he is not ride-or-die, no needs of his own, for the whole film. Even he gets to look inside and wonder if what he wants lines up with what his girlfriend wants. This sort of unfolding of everyone considering themselves was wildly refreshing to me. It’s something we don’t always get: people of color in films getting to be introspective, getting to be a little bit selfish, getting to wonder what they want out loud, even if it breaks up the status quo. 

I think what I really liked about this film—besides the queer angst—is how it had a diverse cast without making that decision performative or weirdly hierarchical. It had a diverse cast and that makes sense because America is diverse, because to cast everyone in the world of your film as White in 2024 is to pretend to live in a world where race and ethnicity don’t exist. Maybe for you and your surroundings it doesn’t, but this doesn’t quite ring true to everyone as much as something more representative of the country’s demographics might. 

It reminds me of how, the other day, when I was driving home, I passed this Black man sitting at a bus stop, and behind him, there was an ad on the wall, a picture of a young White man in a suit, riding the subway. I thought about how the ad makers presumed that this young White man in his suit might be relevant to the people sitting at this bus stop in Atlanta, as opposed to, say, a Black person or a person of color. I thought about how sometimes Whiteness presumes that everyone is interested in it, that it doesn’t have to share the stage because everyone loves to see it, can identify with it, but Whiteness is not everything and everyone (has never been everything and everyone), and we are far past the point where you can convincingly pretend that it is. 

I like that Am I OK? doesn’t pretend that everyone and everything is interested in Whiteness, and I like that the people of color in this film are able to choose their own way, that the White main character has to start giving as much as she takes if she isn’t going to end up alone. And while it’s also interesting and important to see her figure out her sexuality, which is explored in sometimes clumsy and excruciating (!) steps, I think it’s just as important to see her figure out how to coexist with people of other backgrounds, to learn how to not make herself enormous or minuscule, but to exist, like the rest of us, somewhere in the middle. 

Image: Max