Rebel Wilson is a lot of things, but earnest is not one of them. For her long-gestating directorial debut, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival way back in 2024, the Aussie comedienne has made what she hopes to be an earnest movie, but her own showy sense of vulgarity as a performer undermines it. It undermines the film through the role she plays, but also through the sensibility she brings to the project. Wilson can’t help it; this is just who she is.

The Deb is a musical about a culture clash in a small town in the bush, where the locals are preparing for the annual debutante ball when they’re shaken up by the arrival of a city girl, the niece of the mayor, who was cancelled at her fancy private school after a misbegotten feminist protest of flashing her breasts at assembly. It’s pretty fertile ground for a coming-of-age story that involves both old-fashioned, rural ways and the buzzwords of current internet culture, and the central role of the mayor’s daughter is a character Wilson herself would have played 20 year ago. If it doesn’t work better, it’s probably because Wilson has made the movie meaner than it needs to be – even for a movie that’s taking some of its cues from Mean Girls, which itself had a musical adaptation on film just two years ago.

Wilson plays the mother of one of the local trio of bullies, who have a habit of picking on Taylah Simpkins (Natalie Abbott), the daughter of the mayor of Dunburn, a fictitious town we’re meant to believe is somewhere in New South Wales. (The mayor is played by none other than Shane Jacobson, musical vet who once appeared in The Rocky Horror Show.) She’s one of those types your heart goes out to, whom the others inexplicably want to squash, just because she isn’t the most beautiful or the fittest. Her cousin Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes) profiles a bit more in that way, but she also gets rejected, either because she’s a threat or because she’s trying too hard to push some city agenda they can’t relate to – not to mention making a podcast about the backward ways of Dunburn.

So Taylah and Maeve do form a bit of an “us against the world” friendship, as the former tries to get a date to the deb while the latter tries to pretend she’s above such old-fashioned patriarchal bullshit. Among the thorns in their side is Annabelle (Stevie Jean), the leader of a trio trying to make it as a sort of TikTok girl group, but not quitting their day jobs as bullies. Her mum, Janette (Wilson), is equally happy to undermine the pair. Meanwhile, spinster Shell (Tara Morice of Strictly Ballroom fame) is trying to sew all the dresses in time for the dance, and still trying to catch the eye of the widowed mayor.

The surprisingly good thing about The Deb is its songwriting from the original stage musical, by Hannah Reilly and Meg Washington. Starting with the catchy opening song “FML,” which is the perfect amount of profane to mildly shock anyone who hasn’t been on the internet lately, Reilly and Washington’s work has good bonafides and establishes a fun tone that carries The Deb pretty far. Although the movie seems to forget at stretches that it’s a musical, none of the songs feel like filler and there are no clunkers.

The thing that’s less good, which is unsurprising if we know Wilson’s proclivities as a public personality, is a sense that there’s real dickishness embedded in how the characters treat each other. This seems to be because Wilson doesn’t know how to modulate the actual amount of dickishness there should be. She’s basically like the Amy Poehler character in the original Mean Girls, but she’s also larding up the performance with a lot of shtick – which few of the other actors have any interest in doing. So she’s sticking out for all the wrong reasons, both the volume of the performance and its tenor.

This does start to filter through the rest of the cast, leading to moments that go beyond the usual amount of comeuppance characters need on their fraught journeys toward becoming better people. Musicals are meant to be sunny and optimistic by nature, but this one’s sunniness is more a literal, physical part of the environment. Even as the characters are supposedly growing, they’re also losing our sympathy with enduring nastiness.

Purely as a director, Wilson has a good sense of how to stage this stuff and how to get a facsimile of the vibe she’s going for. There’s nothing amateurish about this production, a sense that is bolstered by the high quality of the songs.

But if it’s her first film as director, it might also be her last. We’ve gotten this far into a review of The Deb without talking about the elephant in the room, which is that the reason the film took so long to debut, even in its own country, is that it’s been plagued by legal battles and the sort of cattiness on Wilson’s part that this movie is purportedly decrying. There’s no need to go into who accused who of what, but the film being dragged through courtrooms and the darker corners of social media has left a stain on it that you can’t ignore if you’ve been following any of this. Then again, maybe that’s the stain Wilson leaves wherever she goes, whether she tries to or not.

 

The Deb opens today in Australian cinemas.