[8.6/10] I imagine trying to explain to a friend what *The Big Sick* is about and the best I can come up with is, “It’s a romantic comedy that also involves dealing with a loved one having a very serious illness and the familial bumps and bruises of cultural assimilation.” The fact that this description sounds a little insane, and is, at a minimum, a mouthful, speaks to the incredible balancing act that writer and star Kumail Nanjiani, co-writer Emily V. Gordon, and director Michael Showalter pull off in the film. Their feature manages to be all of these things at once, woven together, without any of these different plots or genres feeling like strange bedfellows.

The most surprising thing about the film is that it remains both very funny and very real throughout. There are big laughs in the movie, some in the guise of the stand-up gigs that Kumail (playing a very lightly fictionalized version of himself) and his friends frequent, but most just coming from the awkward but amusing interactions people have in their everyday lives, even when the worst and most difficult things are happening. Kumail’s soft-spoken wit and comic rhythms are still present on and off-stage, but it emerges organically from the situations his character is in, never feeling out of place or punched up for extra giggles where they don’t fit naturally.

The movie fits loosely into three major acts: the passionate but complicated relationship between Kumail and Emily, the struggle and commiseration between Kumail and Emily’s parents during her unexpected illness, and the post-recovery reckoning of Kumail and Emily’s lives having each, very separately, been through this harrowing experience. It helps give the film a little structure, and give the different parts of an unique story each have time to breathe.

The thread that runs through each of these acts is the pressure Kumail faces from his family, and the distance he feels between the Pakistani culture and life his parents want him to adopt and the American values and norms he’s taken on here. *The Big Sick* is a love story, a medical story, and a family story, but it is also an immigrant story, one that will be familiar to anyone whose cultural traditions different from those in the mainstream, but which is still very particular to Kumail’s Pakistani-American experience. He does not want an arranged marriage or an Islamic spiritual life, but he also cannot just turn away from the millennia of cultural inheritance his parents have bestowed upon him, let alone turn away from them.

The film takes the particulars of that experience seriously. When Kumail confesses his uncertainty about the LSAT-taking, arranged marriage appointment-filled life his parents want him to lead, his mother’s declaration of “you are not my son” is devastating. But it also hints at the universality of that type of experience when Emily’s mom, Beth, describes how her husband’s thoroughly New York affect made him an awkward fit for her North Carolina military family. *The Big Sick* steers away from bland “we’re not so different” platitudes, but still gestures toward the idea that the blending of any two families, with different sensibilities and traditions, has its challenges but also its lights at the end of the tunnel.

Some of the best parts of *The Big Sick* come when Kumail becomes a partner to Beth and her husband, Terry, as the three of them jointly cope with someone they care about having a life-threatening medical emergency. Given that Emily’s medical trauma comes after a harsh break-up, Beth is initially wary and even disdainful of Kumail, and Terry is more yielding but still a little cautious. But over time, and through the crucible of possible tragedy, the human connection between them wins out.

It comes through when Beth stands up for Kumail against a racist heckler at one of his stand-up gigs. It comes through when Terry confesses his own marital difficulties to Kumail after the strain of Emily’s deterioration puts both him and his wife at frayed ends. It comes through when the three of them bond over their love for this poor, sick young woman. But the nice thing is that it doesn't come in big speeches or major gestures. It comes in these little, understated human moments, bolstered by incredible performances from Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, and the film’s star.

That realness bolsters the film from start to finish. The relationship between Kumail and Emily at the beginning of the film isn’t the usual romcom fantasy. There’s bumps in the road and the pair calling one another on particular moves and tests, and even discussions of poo. And their break-up doesn't come from some arbitrary obstacle but from a much more legitimate breaking. Kumail admits that at some point he’d have to choose between his love for Emily and his family, and he can’t do that, and Emily realizes that Kumail had kept this major stumbling block from her, hidden him from the other part of his life, all this time. It becomes apparent that much of the real Kumail and Emily’s story made it into this script, because the interactions seem truer, the reasons for dissolution more potent, than the usual boy-meets-girl folderol.

But the same is true for their slow, post-recovery reconciliation. When Kumail tries to express how devoted he was, how much he’s changed, how much he wants Emily back in his life, Emily calls out (diplomatically) the fact that she was in a coma when he went through all of this. She’s still licking her wounds from what broke them up. Things don’t just magically go back to normal. It takes living with that idea, seeing him make meaningful choices to grow up and decide what he really wants (as all men in Judd Apatow-produced films must eventually do) before they’re both ready to try things again.

*The Big Sick* is not a film of easy fixes: for Emily’s illness, for her parents’ marital strain, or for her relationship with Kumail. But when those fixes come, they come slowly and sometimes painfully, and yet things get better. The film earns the chance comment out of concern and even desperation that helps to diagnose emily. It earns the quiet moment of shared comfort when Beth and Terry need each other’s company. It earns the restrained sweetness and good wishes from Kumail’s parents to their prodigal son. And it earns the bookended exchange between Emily and Kumail at the start and finish of the film, each of which signify, in strange but compelling terms, that something special is beginning.

It’s that realness which makes the film capable of balancing so many things without losing any of them. There is truth in its story of a second generation immigrant finding his path between his parents’ expectations and his own hopes and dreams. There is realness in its depiction of parents and peers coming together over the hardship and uncertainty of a family illness. And there’s bumps in the road of courtship and bridging those gaps, which make both of these things obstacles, but eventually bridges, into the fulfilling relationship that allowed these two people to get through it, come together, and write an Oscar-nominated screenplay about the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine a happier ending than that, no matter how tricky the story is to explain.