By Jason Osiason

One Night Only is just a movie I wanted to work. I love these actors. And it failed them.

Will Gluck’s high-concept rom-com imagines an America three years into “the mandate,” where premarital sex is outlawed except for one 12-hour window a year, tracked by wrist sensors that flip green at 7 p.m. Callum Turner is Owen, a New York pizza shop owner planning to propose to his girlfriend Malika, played by Maya Hawke, on the big night, until she announces over sushi that she’s spending it with a finance bro instead. Monica Barbaro is Allie, an aspiring singer with stage fright who pays rent covering songs for commercials. They collide, and the movie sends them ricocheting through the city until sunrise.

Here’s the thing that genuinely confused me. The film fails to make Barbaro a believable singer, and I don’t understand how. Her Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown blew the floor with authenticity, every note lived-in and dangerous. Gluck reportedly rewrote the role into a singer specifically after casting her, and then the movie half-asses it: a few jingle covers, a stage-fright arc it barely commits to, a payoff you can see from Brooklyn. Why make her a singer at all if you’re not going to let her sing like she can?

That timidity infects everything. The two leads are completely game and have real chemistry, warm and quick and worth a much better script. But the film is afraid to make bold choices with its characters and its settings, so you get a sex comedy that’s weirdly sexless and a dystopia that’s brightly lit and basically consequence-free. It’s neutered on its own premise. And I was fighting through the convoluted plotting the whole way, mandate rules that bend whenever the story needs them to.

Then there are the moments that are just laughable. Charlie Gillespie plays Ezra Strong, an Adam Levine-type rock star who takes Allie home, strips to his underwear, and spirals into a rant that lands somewhere around maybe-the-fascists-got-this-one-right when it comes to sex. It’s meant as satire, I think, but the movie never decides who it’s actually holding accountable, the government, the public, the mandate itself, so the jokes just hang there.

What this really wants to be is a romantic-comedy After Hours. Two people spiraling out of control through nighttime New York, high stakes on a clock, wacky misadventures stacking up: the club with its unimpressed bouncers, the rock star’s apartment, a detour through Owen’s parents played by Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton, side characters constantly trying to seduce them apart, goose chases across the boroughs. That’s a great shape for a movie. Scorsese’s version ran on dread. This one needed the writing and the humor to carry it, and it simply isn’t funny enough, scene after scene with the cadence of jokes but not the punchlines.

Turner is the future, full stop, and Barbaro is a movie star waiting on the right vehicle. A comedy about forbidden desire that’s missing the desire, and the nerve. [C]