You Are So Not Invite To My Bat Mitzvah is a well-acted, well-written, and sweet-natured coming-of-age film, featuring Sunny Sandler as Stacey Friedman, a Hebrew school student who is eagerly looking forward to both her Bat Mitzvah and the party after while also dreading the prospect of that party being ruined by her well-meaning but kind of embarrassing parents (Adam Sandler and Idina Menzel).

Stacey believes that the party, the first major event of her adulthood, will determine the rest of her life and therefore, it’s important that it be a huge party with a wonderful entrance video and at least one celebrity guest.  Her older sister (a wonderfully deadpan Sadie Sandler) tells her not to get her hopes up.  Her father tells her to stop obsessing on her party and concentrate on what it means to be Jewish.  Stacey can only watch in horror as her parents invite their dry cleaner to the ceremony and her mother insists on buying her a dress that Stacy says makes her look like the woman who takes sick kids out of the classroom.

Still, Stacey knows that no matter what happens, she’ll always have her BFF, Lydia Rodriguez Katz (Samantha Lorraine), at her side.  Except that, in the weeks leading up to her Bat Mitzvah, Stacey discovers that Lydia is dating Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman), the inarticulate soccer player that Stacey has had a crush on for years.  Of course, as Lydia points out, every girl at the school has had a crush on Andy for years.  In a moment of anger, Stacey announces, “You are so not invited to my bat mitzvah!”

As I said, it’s a sweet and very sincere movie, one that celebrates friendship and family.  It’s not particularly shocking that Andy turns out to be a middle school jerk but everyone’s had a crush like Andy Goldfarb and, if they’re lucky, everyone had had friends like Stacey and Lydia.  In the end, the message here is that friendship is more important than some boy who can barely speak in complete sentences and that being adult means thinking about more than just your own concerns.  It’s a good message.  This film acknowledges its debt to John Hughes by having Stacey’s father take her to a festival of Hughes’s film and, like the best of those films, You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah is a teen comedy with heart.

Also, like the best of John Hughes’s films, it’s full of memorable characters.  It’s tempting to roll your eyes when you see just how many people involved in this film are named Sandler but everyone gives such a good performance that you quickly forget about any charges of nepotism.  We all know that Adam Sandler has made a lot of bad films over the years but he seems to finally be at a point in his career where he’s no longer embarrassed by the fact that he can actually be a good actor.  Sunny Sandler is likable and relatable as Stacey and easily carries the film’s emotional moments while Sadie Sandler’s deadpan delivery is one of the movie’s highlights.  Idina Menzel, who also played Adam Sandler’s wife in the far different Uncut Gems, is perfectly cast as Stacey’s overbearing but loving mother and Sandler’s real-life wife, Jackie Sandler, is well-cast as Lydia’s mother.  Samantha Lorraine makes both her friendship with and her anger at Stacey feel real and poignant.  Sarah Sherman is great as the quirky but ultimately quite wise rabbi.  Even Luis Guzman shows up and is responsible for some of the film’s funniest moments.

If I had seen this film two months ago, I probably would have said that it was a simply a well-made and very likable coming-of-age film.  Seeing it today, at a time when Jews are being told not to enter certain neighborhoods and to hide any external signs of their religion and their cultural background, You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah feels very relevant.  At a time when anti-Semitism is being mainstreamed and posters of abducted Jewish children are being ripped off walls and people are openly chanting the most vile of words, You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah feels almost defiant.  It is a film about people who proudly and unapologetically Jewish and, when Stacey reads from the Torah at her Bat Mitzvah, it’s not just the prelude to a party or a chance for her to realize that her friendships are more important than the Andy Goldfarbs of the world.  It’s a religious ceremony, it’s a cultural tradition, and it’s a proud and triumphant declaration of identity, one that defies all of the hateful bigots.  In these troubled times, You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah is a film that takes on an entirely new importance.