Rebel Wilson's campy musical is a mix of things

When Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes) is suspended from school after a political rally backfires, her mother (Susan Prior), who is also the school's principal, sends the Sydney teenager to live with her cousin Taylah (Natalie Abbott) in the Australian outback.

Dunburn, the fictional location of Rebel Wilson's uneven directorial debut The Deb is set in a small town recovering from a years-long drought and the neglect of national ministries. The local government is desperate for money to maintain its water supply and has resorted, in one of the film's funniest gags, to making a viral video to draw attention to their plight. Of course, none of these problems concern Maeve, who arrives in Dunburn already planning her escape.

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Deb follows the adventures of Maeve, a fish out of water, in Dunburn. Upon arrival, the cosmopolitan teenager loudly rejects the town's regressive traditions. In particular, Maeve complains about the annual debutante ball, which Taylah dreams of attending. She can't understand why her cousin would subject herself to such backward pomp and circumstance. Soon, of course, Maeve realizes that she can't so easily dismiss this small town or its people.

The Deb is based on the highly regarded stage musical of the same name by Hannah Reilly (who returns to write the screenplay) and Meg Washington (who serves as an executive producer). It's a slightly kitschy movie musical whose cultural self-awareness when it comes to teenage life could be compared to this year's Bad Girls musical adaptation but whose narration owes much to Muriel's WeddingTaylah, like Muriel, is a big-hearted country girl who dreams of love and social acceptance—the kind of underdog onscreen protagonist who has become more common since P.J. Hogan’s 1994 film premiered at TIFF.

While Muriel wanted to get married, Taylah wants to find a date for the debutante ball, a tradition that brings her closer to her late mother. Her transformation and friendship with Maeve drive much of the film’s action and provide a touching, if predictable, relationship to root for. It helps that MacInnes (who played Maeve in the stage production) and Abbott fully embrace their characters and the over-the-topness required by the movie musical. Their performances, as well as a handful of others including Shane Jacobson as Taylah’s father, Rick, and Tara Morice as a local seamstress, soften the film’s more obvious gimmicks.

Aside from the acting, which tends toward the ridiculous and amplifies the film's over-the-top nature, The Deb struggle in its translation to the screen. The music is a contemporary pastiche, improvising on different genres and arranged in ways reminiscent of Pitch perfect covers — and while some are memorable, thoughts of many others fade with the credits. Wilson’s direction is equally uneven, especially toward the film’s middle, inserting convenient plot points to distract from the narrative subtlety. The result is a lopsided pacing that threatens to ruin the film’s more successful parts.

Like this year Bad Girls, The Deb successfully plays with the tools of the social media age, adapting the aspect ratio to mimic iPhones and incorporating the use of platforms like TikTok or Instagram into its narrative. The film opens with an upbeat pop number (one of the strongest in the film) that introduces Maeve to the world of an elite private school in Sydney. The new teenage experience involves documenting every aspect of their lives and engaging in Plastics-like taunting and cruelty.

The problem, of course, is that all these students are hyper-tuned to injustice, so they always hit up instead of down. Maeve’s popularity, both in real life and online, comes from her outspokenness on feminist issues. But she’s also a classic bully, and after one of her political acts goes awry, her classmates are more than eager to erase her reputation. In the spirit of the 21st century’s most notable erasures, Maeve retreats from public life to reflect.

The country air doesn’t suit our chronically online city girl, so from the moment Maeve arrives in Dunburn, she begins plotting her departure. She plans to make her grand return to Sydney with a podcast chronicling her small-town life, and begins recording all of her interactions. She ropes in Taylah, making her trip to the debutante ball the main narrative, and interviews the resident mean girls, Danielle (Brianna Bishop), Chantelle (Karis Oka), Annabelle (Stevie Jean), and Annabelle’s mother Janette (played by Wilson), a beautician who makes Regina George look angelic. As Maeve zips around town investigating, she’s also being pursued by a bad boy named Mitch (Hal Cumpston), who we never learn much about.

A significant portion of The DebThe plot revolves around Maeve keeping her podcast's true intentions a secret while forming a true friendship with Taylah, but there are other narratives threaded through this film. One concerns the fate of Dunburn, which is in desperate need of government funding, and the other concerns a romance between Rick and Shell (Morice), the town tailor, that will or will not come to fruition. These threads are introduced with confident scenes and catchy tunes that accompany decent choreography, but the balance is lost when the plot lines demand more involvement. Despite the 2-hour runtime, parts of The Deb can be frustratingly superficial.

This could be forgiven if the rest of the film had any meaningful coherence, but it doesn't. The Debmuch like Maeve's experience at Dunburn, it is ultimately a mixed bag of situations.