The hunky, sweet hero in the new romantic drama “Reminders of Him” at one point turns to the movie's heroine and tells her: “I’m starting to wonder if you’re the saddest girl I’ve never met.” It's hard to argue.
First, she’s a penniless former prison inmate who has returned to her small town of Laramie, Wisconsin, where she's hooking up with her former boyfriend’s best friend. Second, that boyfriend is dead and she's been blamed, hence the prison sentence.
Plus, she’s hoping to connect with her estranged daughter, born of tragedy.
There's a lot going on with Kenna Rowan, who can't afford a phone or a car and so walks everywhere around the town, lives in a run-down motel and can't initially get a job because she's a felon. She hates listening to the radio because all the songs are sad. Pot calling the kettle, right?
“Reminders of Him” is very faithful to Colleen Hoover’s 2022 novel of the same name, right down to slices of the same dialogue and even the Mountain Dew T-shirt, jean shorts and boots our heroine is first introduced in. She finally gets a job as a grocery bagger and starts building a life, biding her time until she figures out how to reconnect with her daughter.
Maika Monroe — a one-time scream queen — stretches out her dramatic muscles to play Kenna and nails the assignment, a woman with a hard shell who is looking for a little grace, a tricky role that's both flirty and maternal.
After seven years in prison, Kenna walks into a fraught situation. Her 5-year-old daughter — yeah, the math is a bit hazy here — is being raised by her dead boyfriend's parents, with an assist from his best friend, Ledger, played with real soul by Tyriq Withers. Kenna's mere presence threatens to blow up this cozy arrangement.
What's remarkable about “Reminders of Him” is that there are no villains. The grandparents — played by Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford, both perfect — are naturally aghast at the notion that the woman who was driving the car when their son died might swoop in and take their grandchild. But any parent can sympathize with Kenna, who gave birth in handcuffs and never got to even hold her baby.
Ledger is caught in the middle, attracted to this sad Kenna but also a fierce defender and surrogate father of her daughter, Diem. Falling in love with the lady accused of killing your best friend may not be the wisest thing to do, but there you go.
The movie veers dangerously close to overwrought melodrama — like a line about Kenna “heading back to the place it all went wrong hoping to make something right” — and it flirts with twee: Not many grocery store baggers spend their off-time dancing at dusk with sparklers.
But that's what happens when you add romance to a redemption story and the actors pull it off, with perhaps the best performance by little Zoe Kosovic, who plays Diem with freshness, adorableness and directness. Also kudos to actor Monika Myers, who plays a motel neighbor with the timing and dry wit of Bob Newhart.
There are men here, of course, but this is a very female-driven work, from the executive producers and producers to the screenplay writers — Hoover and Lauren Levine — to the director, Vanessa Caswill, who shows a very assured hand.
Everywhere on screen, women stand up for women. A female assistant manager at the grocery store reaches out to offer Kenna employment when her male boss won't, a female motel owner offers a discount and it is the grandmother who provides a breakthrough to this familial standoff.
It is a thoughtful production where details matter. At one point we learn the dead boyfriend’s favorite color is yellow and later we hear not one but two versions of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” There may be a few too many shots of an orange Ford F-150 and heavy use of a strummy acoustic guitar whenever a tender moment is coming, but “Reminders of Him” is a well-crafted, well-acted sad-happy Hoover adaptation.
“Reminders of Him,” a Universal Pictures release that opens in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for sexual content, strong language, drug content, some violent content and brief partial nudity. Running time: 114 minutes. Three stars out of four.
