This summer marks four years since Netflix released To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, a smash hit that created in-house stars out of leads Noah Centineo and Lana Condor, near single-handedly cemented Netflix’s revival of the romcom, and generated sweet movie magic the platform has been chasing ever since. The two franchise sequels and similar YA entries, such as this May’s Along for the Ride (written by To All The Boys scribe Sofia Alvarez), have struggled to recapture the charm of the original, in large part because charm by nature cannot be manufactured.
Which makes it surprising, as someone who has viewed many of these attempts, that Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between, the latest Netflix YA summer romance from TATBILB producers and starring TATBLIB veteran Jordan Fisher, mostly delivers where the others have fallen short. The central romance clicks, the alchemy amounts to more than the sum of its parts and the taut narrative clocks in at a breezy 82 minutes. The script’s reference-heavy banter, from Ben York Jones and Amy Reed based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Jennifer E Smith, is more than halfway believable. There are frustrating limits to the world the film portrays – affluent and aspirational suburbia, a very narrow and overrepresented slice of the American teenage experience. But within the confines of that worldview, it nails the heady delusions and all-consuming neuroses of adolescents on the brink of change, largely due to two very winning performances from Fisher and co-star Talia Ryder.
