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The Broken Hearts Gallery review – one to fall in love with

<span>Photograph: George Kraychyk/AP</span>
Photograph: George Kraychyk/AP

After being dumped and fired, gallery assistant Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) drunkenly climbs into the wrong silver Prius, thinking it’s her Uber. Its owner, a handsome hotel developer named Nick (Dacre Montgomery), is so charmed he drives her home anyway. This meet-cute begets a blossoming friendship and the pair start hanging out in Nick’s half-finished boutique hotel (“I’m building a place that feels like the spots I fell in love with when I first moved to New York,” he says without irony of its faux-hipster aesthetic). Seeing potential, self-proclaimed “emotional hoarder” Lucy convinces him to let her curate an exhibition of donated heartbreak memorabilia on its mezzanine floor, inspired by the mementos she’s kept from her own exes.

The premise of writer Natalie Krinsky’s directorial debut sounds cheesy, and it is, but watching the brooding Nick softening to putty in our goofball heroine’s presence while she remains sparkily oblivious is an earnest pleasure. Viswanathan’s swagger was the highlight of 2018’s teen comedy Blockers. She channels that same extroverted energy here, as do protective best friends Nadine (Hamilton’s Phillipa Soo), a lesbian lothario with a weakness for Russian models, and the bossy, grumpy Amanda (Molly Gordon) with a silent, live-in boyfriend who knows he’s best seen and not heard.