The Big Sick

Success tends to breed copycats. So when The Big Sick does gangbusters – and God I hope it does gangbusters, it surely deserves to – some dumbass Hollywood suit is probably gonna wanna make more coma comedies. That’s the wrong takeaway. What said suit should be ordering are more romantic comedies this intimate and ambitious.

Comic Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley) and his wife Emily V. Gordon wrote the script, inspired by their own courtship, which is to say there’s something of a spoiler already baked into the backstory. Nanjiani, with deadpan perfection, plays the fictionalized version of himself, a struggling stand-up comedian in Chicago who is close with his parents but not exactly forthcoming about his ambivalence about the parade of Pakistani women of a marriageable age who always seem to be “in the neighborhood” whenever Kumail comes to family dinner. His parents want desperately to arrange a marriage for him to a nice Muslim girl, but then happenstance puts in his path a feisty blond grad student named Emily (Zoe Kazan).

In the film’s compact first act, Kumail and Emily blaze through very funny, and very sweet, new-relationship markers: the pillow talk and personality litmus tests, as when Emily charmingly bristles at Kumail watching her watch one of his favorite films: “I love it when men test me on my taste.”

And then there is the second spoiler, spelled out in the title itself: Kumail and Emily’s relationship is thrown a curveball when Emily is hospitalized with a potentially fatal illness. From a strictly storytelling perspective, benching the love interest is a daring deviation from the expected beats of the genre, and an unexpected boon. Once Emily is put into a medically induced coma, this romantic comedy expands to include her parents (Ray Romano and Holly Hunter), who fly in from North Carolina to sit bedside. Kumail finds himself courting them, too.

Producer Judd Apatow has a special aptitude for nurturing personal projects from comedians (Amy Schumer with Trainwreck, Lena Dunham with Girls and Pete Holmes with Crashing).The Big Sick is as personal as it gets, but Gordon and Nanjiani steer clear of preciousness. I laughed plenty and cried my guts out too, then went home elated.

The romantic comedy has been declared dead about as many times as Wile E. Coyote ran himself off a cliff, but he always bounced back. So will the rom-com, as long as there are passionate new practitioners of the genre around like Gordon and Nanjiani.

THE BIG SICK (3 1/2) Directed by Michael Showalter • Starring Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan • Rated R • 119 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte