“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” Wayne Gretzky once said, wholly ignoring the identical completion rate of attempts taken in immediate proximity to the goal. Sure, the half court heaves, Hail Mary’s, and swings outside the strike zone will always lead SportsCenter and the excitable conversation at your local dive bar, but points are points, and the safe ones add up just the same as their spectacular brethren. There’s no need to get fancy when simple victory is the ultimate objective, a notion that director Lawrence Lamont might as well have tattooed across his chest. The music-video-helmer-turned-filmmaker’s debut feature, One of Them Days, is all efficiency over innovation, harkening so irrefutably back to a bawdy 90’s comedy template that the nostalgia machine risks blowing a gasket. Yes, The Great One was right to champion boldness when appropriate, but Days is more inclined to reinterpret the words of another all-time sporting great, Michael Jordan. “The ceiling is the roof,” never made much sense, but if you raise your qualitative floor all the way to the canopy, the threat of failure disappears in the collapsing space in between.

Must be nice, being so cushioned by your own design that coming up short is all but impossible, and while Lamont is clearly making the most of his relaxed headspace, his protagonists don’t know the first thing about a peaceful mind. Especially Dreux (Keke Palmer), a Los Angeles diner waitress who’s looking to stop living paycheck-to-paycheck through a move up the corporate ladder, with her longtime bestie and roommate, Alyssa (SZA), seeking to mirror the jump by making a splash as a painter. Had we made their acquaintance during any other 24 hour period, those missions would likely be tantamount, but as the title suggests, our timing is all off. Tasked with retrieving $1,500 of stolen rent money before the sun goes down, the two scurry around the City of Angels in a fleet-footed frenzy, cinching their film’s most obvious comparison point in the process.

That would be Friday, director F. Gary Gray’s 1995 stoner comedy that Days emulates with its every movement, situating Palmer and SZA as feminine rejoinders to the bumbling machismo of Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. The setting, truncated timeline, and manic quest to come up with a relatively paltry stack of dough are all in place; hell, Days even comes prepared with its very own Deboo in the form of Aziza Scott’s leering, bug-eyed antagonist, Berniece. Cooking from such a known recipe always risks a bit of inertia, but Lamont and screenwriter Syreeta Singleton are paying loving homage within the guardrails, packing their flick with enough inspired mania to rebuff any accusations of cover band mimicry. The apparatus may be tried-and-true, but the scenes within aren’t satisfied with coasting, bouncing from one episodic flurry of chaos to the next with the fervor of an over-sugared trick or treat-er. It’s one thing to get the groans and guffaws going in a packed auditorium, but Days is often funny or gross enough to prompt an audible reaction without the benefit of audience support, most chiefly evidenced by a blood bank set piece whose stomach-turning affronts owe nothing to its forbearers.

It’s the good kind of revolting, a queasy-making knot in the middle of a movie that’s generally more fond of smooth, inviting surfaces, and when it comes to the film’s headliners, that water is always glass. Palmer has made a career out of giving immaculate vibes a human form, the perfect counterpart for any unseasoned performer looking to make the big screen leap and land softly, but SZA doesn’t need to be carried. The R&B star is a natural, charming and winsome in her own right, and while her surprising screwball acuity will surely turn heads, her chemistry with Palmer is the real revelation. Whether bickering, flailing, or hyping each other up, you never doubt that the two know each other inside out, their inside jokes permeating the fictional boundary to the point that you stop seeing them as individual performers. They’re a two-person hive mind, capturing years’ worth of believable companionship in their first interaction, and riding the wave to the closing credits.

Their union, when paired with Lamont’s enviable style and the movie’s overarching time machine appeal, push the social commentary of Singleton’s script down the pecking order of importance, but it’s right there for anyone who wants to get heady. The cash-strapped launching point here isn’t just a tool to get the narrative ball rolling, but a steady motif that manages to touch on housing inequality, racial prejudice, and group economics within the flick’s tidy 97-minute runtime. Always more cheeky than heavy-handed, the thorny themes at play are further assuaged by their delivery system, dolled out in hilarious fashion by Katt Williams, Lil Rel Howery, and Janelle James among a cavalcade of side-splitting bit players. Soft pedaling your big ideas in this manner renders most films a bit toothless, but One of Them Days isn’t here to take a bite in the first place. This one is all about gliding.

Aerodynamics were always essential to the movie’s decades-old counterparts, turning both plot holes and laugh-line face plants from irritating bugs into cozy features, and Lamont and Singleton have learned from the greats. Nothing about Dreux and Alyssa’s tinseltown meanderings is particularly believable, the personal growth they experience could never happen over such a brief period, and a handful of jokes are broad enough to serve as the foundation for a new home. The crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s takes time and energy, and One of Them Days, like its predecessors, would rather spend those invaluable resources on inviting revelry. It won’t blow your doors off, but that’s part of the calculation, an unapologetic return to a form of movie making that should never have disappeared in the first place. Let someone else worry about Gretzky’s all-or-nothing take on mathematics; One of Them Days is here with the low stakes that you’ve been missing, both ceiling and roof be damned.