Keke Palmer, SZA in a comedy of the 90s Verve

“One of Them Days,” starring Keke Palmer and SZA as fast-talking, flat-out Los Angeles roommates who have nine hours to make the rent, is a winning return to the kind of day-in-the-hood comedy they used to make in the ’90s — movies like “Friday” (1995) and “The Players Club” (1998), which squeezed just enough texture in between laughs to qualify as audience-friendly slice of life. These films, usually produced by New Line, were descendants of “House Party” and Spike Lee (notably the exuberant opening 45 minutes of “Do the Right Thing”), though they were also a backlash against the dramas of inner-city violence . that had dominated commercial Black cinema in the first half of the 90s. To that genre, they offered a counterbalance of sassy corkscrew humanity, teaching the film industry a lesson — about the place where diversity meets commerce — that it seems it needs to keep learning over and over again.

“One of Them Days” features Dreux (Palmer), a waitress at a franchise restaurant, and Alyssa (SZA), an artist who does as little as possible, as a comedy team operating at advanced levels of verbal speed. They dish out insults and righteous cheerleading with equal glee; the screenplay, by Syreeta Singleton, has a screwball recklessness that it wears lightly on its sleeve. The two need the rent money because their landlord, the gloomy immigrant Uche (Rizi Timane), is cracking down on the tenants in their dilapidated Baldwin Village apartment complex. The place is a hole, but gentrification is in the air and so are eviction notices. Unfortunately, Alyssa gave the money to her kind of boyfriend, the nervous scrub Keshawn (Joshua David Neal), who is full of plans even though he doesn’t even have a home. He spent the money on his latest obsession – ugly acrylic T-shirts that say “Cucci.”

How-will-they-get-the-money? plot, punctuated by a countdown clock that periodically halts the action, catapults our heroines from one situation to the next, but the real subject of “One of Them Days” is simply the people they keep meeting. The film is a sympathetically bent portrait of a society whose residents revel in their energetic dysfunction, which is never too cartoonish to inspire an honest laugh.

Dreux and Alyssa go into a loan office, where Lucky (Katt Williams), the homeless philosopher outside, keeps badgering them through the window, saying “don’t do it” — and the joke is, how right he is. The former stripper (Janelle James) who presides over the blood bank with utilitarian strictness; the thief on a bicycle who keeps rushing past a fast-food checkout window to grab honey-butter crackers; the big-booty-shaking troublemaker (Aziza Scott) who has hijacked Keshawn’s loyalty, if not his heart; the overzealous white girl (Maude Apatow) who moves into the apartment complex and wants to bond with everyone there; vintage Air Jordans hanging from a power line that Alyssa retrieves as if they were gold bars (their market value is $2,500); her subsequent encounter with an EMS van after the power line nearly electrocuted her—it all adds up to a stylized portrait of low-income American desperation.

There’s romance: Dreux’s flirtation with Mercedes-driving madman (Patrick Cage), a former dreamboat criminal who she’s sure must now be some kind of criminal. There’s a con man, played with shifty cleverness by Lil Rel Howry, who buys Air Jordans, and there’s a hilariously merciless drone-voiced mobster, King Lolo (Amin Joseph), who demonstrates that total lack of empathy is already a travesty on himself. And there is the sustained effort of our heroines, as they race through this maelstrom of casual insanity, to keep their heads above it all.

Dreux has an interview scheduled for late afternoon that could land her a job as a franchise manager—her shot to elevate her life into a new layer. Palmer, although in the “straight” role, is so witty in her attack that she commands the screen. And SZA in her film debut simply sizzles. She is a volcano of camp rage. The director, Lawrence Lamont, is a hip-hop video making his feature directorial debut, and while it may seem like his main job is to keep the comedy going, the film’s secret weapon is the visual and rhythmic flow he brings to it . Each encounter feels just random enough to establish its own comedic space. “One of Them Days” has its finger on the pulse of a society that for many is an economic bottomless pit. In the film, the pain of it is real, but the joke of it is that it has turned everyone into a walking flashy coping mechanism. This is what makes them palatable company.