Lilly Singh’s first major film role and credit as a screenwriter, Doin’ It, begins with an explosive ejaculation. Maya (played by Celine Joseph in flashback) is a 14-year-old kid who is naturally curious about her body and that of her boyfriend, Sohan (Yatharth Bhatt), but the young lovers choose an inopportune time to explore: right behind the curtain of their high school talent show.

Sohan has asked Maya to show him her breasts, and Maya consents, in exchange to see Sohan’s penis. It’s a perfectly common exchange that, in this case, leads to Sohan’s immediate ejaculation on Maya’s face just as the curtain rises in front of Maya’s mother and grandmother in the audience (Sonia Dhillon Tully and Usha Uppal, respectively). The two women’s disciplinary reaction is the perfectly understandable and not-at-all reactive decision to move the whole family back to India, where Maya can learn some modesty and unlearn America’s Sєxual liberalism.

Sixteen years later, the now 30-year-old Maya (Singh) has obtained two degrees, a dream of being an app developer, and a phobia of Sєx caused by three decades of Sєxual repression at the hands of her matriarchs. Armed with her career ambitions, Maya moves back Stateside, but finds that selling her app is as hard as getting comfortable with Sєx; she’s still a virgin and still traumatized by the look on her Nani’s face whenever a man comes near.

Nonetheless, Maya finds herself in the inexplicable position of teaching Sєx-ed at a high school whose Principal Fletcher (SNL alum Ana Gasteyer) is desperate enough to meet its diversity, equity, and inclusion quota at the same time the school satisfies the state’s requirement of abstinence-based Sєxual education.

Doin’ It Shines In Its Frank Treatment Of Female Pleasure & Comic Cast

Doin’ It is an extremely likable film. While its setup demands some willful suspension of disbelief (it seems hard to imagine a school that would both honor DEI standards and Christian Fundamentalism, for example), it does eventually settle into a cozy comedy that is somewhere between School of Rock and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Directed by Sara Zandieh from a screenplay by Singh, Zandieh, and Neel Patel, the movie’s narrative beats are familiar and warm.

That is also where the film falters; it seems so beholden to hitting its genre tropes that it forgets to break free from the confines of its own outline. It is, in other words, very written in its story execution and yet underwritten in its character development. As charming as Lilly Singh is, Maya is not exactly readable as someone who has spent more than half her life abroad, in a country that is markedly different from the one of her childhood.

Nonetheless, the film succeeds on the whole, skating by on the rapport between Maya and her friends and colleagues. While Ana Gasteyer doesn’t get nearly enough to do, Sabrina Jalees is delightful and charismatic as Jess, Maya’s childhood best friend, who is intent on taking Maya through a “bucket list” of lost high school dreams. Mary Holland shines as the perfidious, wicked Miss Linda, Maya’s Karen of a co-worker, whose self-aggrandizement is perpetually hilarious. And Stephanie Beatriz steals the film as Barb, the school’s cafeteria chef who is long on lust but short on education.

Singh herself proves ready for the spotlight, and it is easy to ride alongside her as she deals with her overbearing mother (whom Tully somehow makes sympathetic and lovely), or learns to flirt with the only other Asian faculty member, Alex (Trevor Salter), whose facility with the Filipino cooking of his ancestry is as Sєxy to Singh as his (implied) large genitalia. But she also appears quite green as an actor, frequently resorting to adding “okay?” or other small ad-libs to her dialogue in a way that reveals her newness to performance and a self-consciousness about perceived naturalism.

Meanwhile, the script has the distinct texture of television. Zandieh’s facility with comedy notwithstanding, the film is overly lit and televisual, which makes the movie read more like an extended pilot than a genuine narrative feature. But the film’s entire cast is so fun to be around, and the jokes and one-liners too sharp, that its weaker aspects are often more than compensated for by brightness and levity.

That the film is so admirably Sєx-positive, especially as it is from the too-often silenced perspective of female pleasure, makes it all the more refreshing. As Maya inadvertently finds that she has not just the facility but the pᴀssion for Sєxual education, Doin’ It actually paints a possibly rosy way forward for a topic too often considered taboo in this, or any country, and the normalizing of pleasure is a lesson we all can learn — regardless of gender idenтιтy or expression.