Y’all know gotdamn well how I Want You Back ends.

If you’ve heard about the latest rom-com straight off the Amazon Studios conveyor belt, you know how the whole story plays out. Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate) are two people whose respective, significant others (Gina Rodriguez, Scott Eastwood) have recently broken up with them. While each having a stairwell crying jag in the office building where they work, they get to know each other and hatch a plan to get their exes back. 

First, Emma helps our boy out by volunteering as a stage crew member for a middle-school production of Little Shop of Horrors, staged by the drama teacher (The Good Place’s Manny Jacinto) who Peter’s girl is now dating. She’s looking to dismantle their union by pulling out the sexy dresses and flirting up a storm. Peter goes on a less flirtatious route; he hires Emma’s fitness-trainer ex, hopefully building enough of a bond where they can pal around and talk about relationships — particularly, the relationship his trainer/new best friend has with his pie shop-owner girlfriend (Clark Backo). 

For rom-com lovers and haters, Back might be an unusual watch. It’s a love story where the premise is not only absurd, convoluted and over-the-top, but morally messy. I mean, here are two people so hung up on their exes that instead of taking a cue from their former boos and moving the hell on, they join forces to gaslight and manipulate the people they supposedly love in an effort to get them crawling back in their lives. This isn’t even the first time I’ve seen this in a movie: Twenty-five years ago, Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick paired up to stalk their exes all around New York — before finally falling in each other’s arms — in Addicted to Love. 

And, yet, this unlikable plot is filled with likable things. Director Jason Orley (Big Time Adolescence) and screenwriters Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (Love, Simon) populate this flick with the most relatable, sympathetic characters I’ve ever seen in a rom-com that Richard Curtis didn’t have anything to do with. 

At the top of the list are Day’s Peter and Slate’s Emma. Despite the fact that they’re doing a horrible thing, their characters are mostly presented as lost and lovesick, stuck in that proverbial, existential rut adults get when they haven’t figured out how to be mature and responsible just yet. It helps that Day (keeping the manic shrieking he perfected on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to a minimum) and Slate (displaying a seductive confidence even when she’s neurotic and awkward) make a witty, adorable couple, virtually oblivious to the off-the-charts chemistry they have until one finally realizes it and the other has moved on. Some cute subplots (Emma helping out a young boy with parent problems, Peter wanting to open up a proper retirement home) are thrown in to remind viewers that these two aren’t complete scumbags. 

The filmmakers also aren’t afraid to mix in farcical moments, like when Slate tries to engage in a clumsy threesome with Jacinto and Rodriguez or when Day and Eastwood spend an out-of-control night with a trio of young ladies and a Molly-carrying gentleman (played in a quick special appearance by a current SNL castmate).They also don’t take the easy way out and make the exes nor their new loves out to be the bad guys (though Jacinto’s teacher is amusingly pretentious). From the jump, it’s made quite clear who the (still adorable) assholes are in this story. 

Of course, this is all fluffy filler to keep things rolling until we get to the inevitable conclusion for our pitiful protagonists. It takes a sweet while to get there (the movie clocks in at one hour and 51 minutes), eventually unfolding in a predictably implosive fashion — but somehow resolving things in a swift, tidy manner — before it reaches its coda, which calls back an earlier bit of dialogue you knew would rear its head again at the end. 

I Want You Back almost seems like a crazy, cinematic experiment. A bunch of people basically came together to see what would happen if you made one of those complicated, morally messed-up rom-coms and populated it with generally good-natured people you wouldn’t mind hanging out with. This is proof that just because the story is toxic and ridiculous doesn’t mean the characters have to be.

B

“I Want You Back” debuts Friday on Amazon Prime Video.